Digital Twins of Building Physics Experimental Laboratory Setups for Effective E-learning

Hands-on experiments in laboratories are fundamental educational tools for technical sciences. However, laboratories are expensive and not always accessible to students: lockdown and in-person meeting restrictions due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, distant location of teachers and students, facilities used for higher-priority purposes. Moreover, creating specific experimental setups for teaching only can be costly. In that context, digitalizing laboratory setups provides an attractive teaching alternative for remote e-learning. Digital twins are not meant to replace real-world experiments but should enable flexible teaching and effective learning at a lower cost. They complement physical setups and can be virtual extensions, allowing for larger and more complex study cases. e-learning is now popular and many educational institutions provide open-access videos of entire courses. However, the digitalization of practical exercises for engineering is yet limited. The e-learning effort presented in this paper aims to establish a series of digital twins of experimental setups for teaching building physics, energy in buildings and indoor environment. The development of the two first digital twins is detailed here. They are designed for teaching operation and balancing hydronic heating systems. Their numerical models and graphical user interfaces are created with the LabVIEW programming environment.