This paper presents a new test method able to infer - in periods of less than 7 seconds - the refrigeration capacity of a compressor used in thermal machines, which represents a time reduction of approximately 99.95% related to the standardized traditional methods. The method was developed aiming at its application on compressor manufacture lines and on 100% of the units produced. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used to establish a model able to infer the refrigeration capacity based on the data collected directly on the production line. The proposed method does not make use of refrigeration systems and also does not require using the compressor oil.

When an artificial neural network is used to determine the value of a physical quantity its result is usually presented without an uncertainty. This is due to the difficulty in determining the uncertainties related to the neural model. However, the result of a measurement can be considered valid only with its respective measurement uncertainty. Therefore, this article proposes a method of obtaining reliable results by measuring systems that use artificial neural networks. For this, it considers the Monte Carlo Method (MCM) for propagation of uncertainty distributions during the training and use of the artificial neural networks.