A 3-stage online distributed cooperative control based air balancing method for air duct systems

• Main Authors: Cui, Can, Cai, Wenjian, Zhang, Xin
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Air Balancing; Distributed Cooperative Control
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/159606
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The authors have previously proposed a 2-stage online distributed cooperative control-based air balancing (DCC-AB) scheme for air duct systems to realize accurate air balancing and energy saving. However, the practical application shows that the previous 2-stage online DCC-AB scheme may encounter convergence failure when mis-specifying the critical damper. In order to fix this problem, this paper further proposes a 3-stage online DCC-AB method. Unlike the 2-stage online DCC-AB method which selects the critical damper based on an empirical rule, the proposed 3-stage online DCC-AB method introduces a special stage at the beginning of the balancing process to identify the right critical damper to totally eliminate the risk of convergence failure. In addition, the proposed 3-stage online DCC-AB method also introduces a time-varying weighted penalty term to accelerate convergence while ensuring the operation stability. Therefore, the proposed 3-stage online DCC-AB method enjoys the following advantages: a) The convergence failure caused by the misspecification of the critical damper is effectively avoided; b) The convergence rate and the balancing accuracy are further improved compared to the previous 2-stage online DCC-AB method. Finally, the proposed 3-stage online DCC-AB method is validated on a laboratory duct system of 5 terminals under different design flow requirements, no failure cases occur and the absolute relative error of terminal flow is controlled within 7.2% in all test scenarios.