The Use of Arduino and PID Control Approach for the Experimental Setup of HVAC Temperature Testing

—The experimental setup of HVAC testing requires easy but accurate instrumentation, and recent analyses focus on the control based on the mean radiant temperature in order to better perform respect to the users satisfaction. Indeed, the research contribution of this work is the use of Arduino to develop a PID control for an electric heater. As a main feature, this control system can operate by maintaining the set-point on the air temperature or on the mean radiant temperature of the environment where it is placed. The paper describes the design and development of the PID control, as well as the testing of the control system applied to an electric heater, to heat a room in a laboratory in Bologna (Italy). In an Appendix the Matlab script employed to store data on the local pc an to send data to Google Sheets is reported, together with the Google script code employed to write the data from Matlab to the online sheet. As result, the developed PID is accurate in maintaining the required set-point temperature, with minimal deviations from the set-point, in the interval ± 0.2 K.