Teaching Laboratories

Frontal teaching and experimental infrastructure

The Department of Energy pays a lot of attention to experimental teaching, in building B13 of the campus Bovisa-La Masa (which houses most of the teaching laboratories of the entire School of Industrial and Information Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano) there are some test benches designed to allow students to work independently in order to highlight various phenomena relating to fluid machines.

The experimental test benches are complementary to the ex-cathedra didactic activity allowing to realize experiences on more complex systems and components from the engineering point of view.
In fact, it is possible, for example, to experimentally determine the characteristic curves, the main phenomena arising as the boundary conditions vary and the influence of the latter on the performance of turbomachine with incompressible and compressible fluid as well as related components such as the speakers. In particular, it is possible to construct the characteristic curves of a hydraulic pump, to visualize the phenomenon of cavitation on the palar profiles and to carry out a verification of the theory of similarity. The operating maps of a turbo-expander and of a turbo-compressor can also be reconstructed to understand the various phenomena that occur when the relative operating point changes, as well as the operating maps of the fans and their performance; it is also possible to evaluate the variations of the performances undergone by a diffuser in relation to the geometry or to the modification of the input and output conditions. A turbojet test bench allows the performance analysis of a gas microturbine as a whole or of the individual components that make it up.

For internal combustion engines, it is possible to build a real Otto cycle and analyze the pressure trend inside the combustion chamber in the different phases of the thermodynamic cycle.