This thesis presents the construction and characterization of an experimental apparatus to produce sodium Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in  arbitrary potentials. Particular attention is devoted to the study of toroidal BECs as platforms for analogue cosmology models.

We also report the first results from this apparatus in which we studied the red-shifting  and attenuation of azimuthal phonons in expanding toroidal BECs as well as  blue-shifting and amplification of azimuthal phonons in contracting toroidal BECs. The amplification and attenuation of the azimuthal phonons is the result of a non-dissipative friction term that arises from the changing geometry of the background BEC, this non-dissipative friction is analogous to the Hubble friction present in cosmology models.