Temperature Control of a Small Volume-Thermal System in Heating and Cooling Processes with Arduino

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An important field of the temperature control is the identification of physical features of materials at a wide range of operating temperatures. This paper presents the design of a temperature controlled thermal system in heating and cooling processes. This system will be used in a tension-compression testing machine. During the tensile experiments, the aim is to keep the inside of the chamber at a desired temperature. The thermal system consists of an isolated metal box, dry resistance, power regulator, thermocouple, air fun, relay, amplifier, microcontroller and computer. For the cooling processes in cryogenic temperatures, the system has also a solenoid valve, DC motor driver and a liquid nitrogen tank. The temperature of the chamber with a small bulk is controlled by a feedback system. This feedback system measures the temperature with a K-type thermocouple and uses a combination of a table-supported PID, P and on-off controllers to compensate the errors between the reference and measured temperatures. In this setup, Arduino is used as a microcontroller because it is simple, inexpensive and easy to program. This card supplies all communication between the computer and the experimental setup by a program written on the MATLAB with Arduino package for real-time applications. According to the experimental results, the temperature of the insulated chamber can be easily maintained between +450 oC and –100 oC. The user defined different temperature profiles were successfully performed on the setup and the outcomes were compared with the mathematical model in the heating and cooling processes. The deviations from the desired temperatures were found to be at an acceptable level for the applications on a tension-compression testing machine.