Design of a Microcontroller Based Automated Ice-cube Making Machine

I. F. Titiladunayo, R. A. Shittu

Beyond homes and offices, the importance of ice in food service outlets, bars, hotels and some health care services industries, is very significant to quality service delivery as a lot of ice is needed within a short time and continuously for chilling and various other cooling purposes. However, the bulkiness and expensiveness of the manually operated locally made ice machines, which requires the need for a standby operator to carry out ice production activities should be eliminated through automation, in modern ice making machine designs. It is therefore an object of this paper to present the design of a portable self-contained automated ice-cube making machine suitable for small scale ice production within a short period of time, incorporating a control means which limits human interaction with the machine to starting the machine, and collecting ice cubes from the storage bin. The machine was designed, using the principle of vapour compression refrigeration system for the production of 24 cubes of ice measuring 22 × 22 × 22 mm at â‚‹15℃ from 7.667 × 10^â‚‹4 m³of water within 30 minutes. The machine components and design results include: A R-134a reciprocating type compressor of 0.086kW capacity; a bare tube evaporator designed for 0.2984 kW refrigeration load; a finned-tube type condenser with 0.3847 kW capacity; and a water circulation pump of 0.279 × 10^â‚‹3 kW pump power. The process of feeding water into the machine and harvesting of ice cubes is automated through the application of an electronic control system incorporating a PIC16F877A microcontroller. The control unit was designed and simulated on Proteus Design Suite while the programming codes was written in C language on MPLAB IDE.