This week, a Science Camp of the Alliance of Thuringian Engineering Sciences took place at the TU Ilmenau, where selected 20 students of the 10th grade from all over Germany worked together in a total of 5 project teams around the topic "energy". The department of Technical Thermodynamics participated in the camp with the topic "Geothermal Energy", which was chosen by 6 students as their favorite project. Within the framework of the project, they learned the thermodynamic basics to understand the processes that take place in heat pumps and Stirling engines fed from geothermal sources. In the practical part, under the guidance of the two student tutors Ludwig Czapla and Adrien René Kipp, they carried out experimental investigations on model test rigs and were thus able to determine the p-V and T-s diagrams of the two cyclic processes, determine the power figure or the efficiency and compare the measurement results with the theoretical predictions. Finally, the project was presented, which the students mastered with flying colors. The project team was supervised by our colleague Prof. Christian Karcher, who also gave a keynote lecture on "Energy from the perspective of technical thermodynamics - conversion, storage, efficiency" to prepare all participants for the upcoming tasks. Thanks also go to our colleague Wladislaw Seifferth for the excellent technical preparation.

The project team doing the "hard" work of discussing the 1st and 2nd HS of thermodynamics.
The project team at the final presentation and the very successful demonstration of the model experiments.