Heat Transfer Lab

The Heat Transfer Laboratory is located in Rooms 150, 151, and 151A of the Academic Wing of the new Texas A&M University at Qatar Engineering Building.  These rooms are comprised of approximately 1,750 ft² of instructional floor area and an equipment storage room of about 250 ft².  During each Spring semester, the Heat Transfer Laboratory course (MEEN 464) is offered.  The typical  enrollment for this course has been about 10 students.  Students conduct experiments and experimental design projects in groups of two to three.  During each laboratory session groups conduct their experiments in each of the two rooms. Thus, there is ample space for students in this laboratory course.

In the laboratory, students use modern equipment to learn to conduct various heat transfer experiments. This equipment includes computer-controlled data acquisition systems, NIST calibrated temperature standards, constant temperature baths, temperature, flow, and pressure measurement instruments, power supplies, digital multimeters, various types of heat exchangers, and a low-speed wind tunnels.  These instruments were purchased new for the laboratory when the building was completed in the Summer of 2007.  There is usually a test apparatus for an experiment for each group of students, except in the cases when the test apparatuses are rather large, such as the wind tunnels, and when groups may use the test apparatuses at different times during the 2-hour-and-50-minute class.

Students also use computer software for data acquisition (National Instruments LabVIEW), data reduction, tabulation, and plotting (Engineering Equation Solver (EES), MATLAB, and Microsoft Excel), report writing (Microsoft Word), and oral presentations (Microsoft PowerPoint).