Dennis Ted P. Duran, Chris Daniel F. Nabiong, John Michael T. Yang (March 2002)
Philippine Science High School Western Visayas Campus – Department of Science and Technology (DOST-PSHS WVC), Brgy. Bito-on, Jaro, Iloilo City 5000, Philippines
ABSTRACT
The researchers have developed a Microsoft Visual Basic 6 program to simulate the temperature of a room, with an air conditioning unit and fluorescent lamp, as a function of space. The simulation is done without resorting to Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics by deriving an analytic approximation derived from results in Equilibrium Thermodynamics, i.e., “Averaging Method”. The temperature, the total energy consumption and the cost of energy consumption of the same room as a function of time was also simulated using the “Temperature -Time Point Method”, and compared these with experimental results.
The Temperature versus Time graph for the two thermostat settings gave results that were conceptually consistent with Newton’s Law of Cooling. In comparing the total energy consumption and the cost of energy consumption versus time graphs of the simulation and the experiment, it was noted that as the time interval increases, the simulation’s predicted data increases with respect to the experimental data.