Remote Refrigeration System Experiments for Control Engineering Education

The extension of the traditional hands-on laboratories to the Internet, in which labs are remotely accessible to the users to perform experiments, is still a challenge for education in engineering. In this paper, we present a remote refrigeration laboratory that allows students, trainees, and engineers to get acquainted with control aspects of mechanical refrigeration systems. Thanks to a university-industry partnership, the remote lab is hosted in an industrial site and it can be accessed by means of a client-server communication and an ad-hoc designed LabVIEW-based user interface, that allows to monitor and control the plant. The user can conduct both open- and closed-loop experiments on a typical vapor compression cycle refrigeration system, testing different control architectures that range from standard regulators to data-driven PID controllers. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.