This project involved designing a device to regulate the flow of chilled water through a heat exchanger based on the coolant temperature of an internal combustion engine. It’s made up of three parts: A controller, a motorized valve, and a temperature sensor.

The controller consists of an arduino, a LM298 based motor driver, resettable fuse, LCD and misc. buttons/connectors.

The motorized valve is a standard ball valve with a bracket to support a gear motor and a encoder for position feedback.

The operator inputs a desired coolant temperature which is maintained by adjusting the flow through the heat exchanger. During this project I learned about driving inductive loads with a micro controller, PID tuning, and closed loop feedback control.