Our April 25 meeting, will feature a presentation by Dr. William (Bill) Miller's Senior Design Project Team. Dr. Miller is a Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as an instructor at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Miller received his Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tennessee. He has led a group of undergraduate Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) students as they complete their Senior Capstone Project.
Bill's current group of students are in the process of building a combined cooling and power (CCP) system that cools air for use in comfort conditioning and generates electricity from waste heat. Rather than dissipate condenser heat to the environment, the refrigeration system will convert the primary refrigerant’s condenser heat into electricity.The key challenge is to transfer refrigerant condenser heat to shaft power and drive a turbine/alternator set for converting high quality heat into useful electricity. Students have used the NIST REFPROP[1] v9.1 refrigerant routines and have modeled the refrigeration cycle using the MATLAB programming language which the School of Engineering at UT has licensed for student academic work. Students are building a prototype CCP with support from UT Facility Services refrigerant technicians.
We expect a good crowd for this meeting - come early and network with fellow ASHRAE members! Better yet, invite a friend or colleague to hear this interesting topic.