This funding support allows the institution to incorporate state-of-the-art controls and on-line performance monitoring capabilities to an existing ten kilowatt mini steam cycle power plant in the thermal engineering laboratory of the Mechanical Engineering Department at San Diego State University. These improvements greatly enhance the instructional value of the mini cycle power plant, making it an effective teaching tool for thermodynamics instruction. In addition, the mini steam cycle improvements add seven new experiments, with state-of-the-art instrumentation and data acquisition, to the thermal engineering portion of the Engineering Systems Laboratory course. This award is being matched byu an equal amount from the principal investigator's institution.
