4793 - A Mobile Laboratory for Building Automation and Control Systems—Part 2: Application in Education

A mobile laboratory for building automation and control systems, the BASmobile, was designed, built, and commissioned as described in a companion paper (Henze et al. 2005). Together with a set of control system demonstration crates, this mobile lab was employed in the context of a senior/graduatelevel university course on building automation and control systems in architectural engineering at the University of Nebraska. During a two-week DDC laboratory session, four learning modules were designed, assigned, and carried out by students, including applications for (1) simple air-handling unit control tested on the demonstration crates, (2) more complex air-handling unit control for the BASmobile, (3) simple central plant control implemented on the demonstration crates, and finally (4) complex central plant control including a partial-storage thermal energy storage strategy for the BASmobile. Student evaluations revealed that the majority welcomes the opportunity to create and test control applications for commercial building HVAC systems and observe the response of both automation and control systems as well as HVAC equipment on a miniaturized scale. During the four preceding years, the same course was taught without the BASmobile and associated learning modules, and the increase in skill and comprehension observed in the current students clearly confirms the educational value of the newly developed instructional tools.