| A heat pump is essentially a device that moves energy from a heat source to a heat sink using some form of work. Almost all modern heat pumps use a vapor-compression cycle. A compressor is used to pump a refrigerant between two heat exchanger coils - a condenser and evaporator. The performance of heat pumps is usually described by a coefficient of performance (COP). In heating mode, this is the ratio of the amount of heat energy delivered from the system divided by the net energy input (e.g., electrical energy) to the machine. In cooling mode, the COP is given by the ratio of thermal cooling provided, divided by the work input to the machine. Heat pumps can be configured to use water or the ground as a heat source (or sink). Ground-source heat pumps typically demonstrate higher efficiencies than air-source heat pumps because the average ground temperatures are lower than air temperatures in the summer, when cooling is required; and similarly higher than average air temperatures in the winter, when heating is required. These units are typically more expensive to install as they require the use of a buried ground loop. Geothermal energy is classified as a renewable resource, where "renewable describes a characteristic of the resource: the energy removed from the resource is continuously replaced by more energy on time scales similar to those required for energy removal.
The Mechanical Engineering laboratory facility at Western New England University includes a fully operational heat pump utilizing geothermal energy, which has a potential to heat and cool the engineering labs. The heat pump experiment was integrated with the geothermal source loop on the campus over ten years ago. This facility is fully instrumented for the collection of key performance data and allows for moderate scale demonstration of efficiency of and COP to students. Through this lab, students not only understand the operations and capabilities of energy removed from the ground, but it also allow them to analyze the cost and the extent of efficiency and sustainability of ground source of energy. This form of hands-on education can have wide ranging functional incentives for businesses large and small in terms of energy consumption, in addition to impacting the design and manufacture of different products such as home heating and air-conditioning systems. This paper describes the development, operations and capability of the energy laboratory to educate and train future managers/owners of companies in addition to how we can enhance our students' understanding of sustainable sources of energy and their application to more cost efficient operations and production in an organization. . |
Updated 03/19/2014