Adaptive control system design for thermal comfort & energy optimization in HVAC system

• Main Author: Pang, Yipeng
• Other Authors: Hu Guoqiang
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67521
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system is the technology of providing heating, cooling and air exchanging functionalities to maintain the occupants’ thermal comfort and the air quality of indoor environment. The HVAC system is important to human’s lives, and is widely implemented in many industrial, commercial and residential buildings. A well-designed control system is crucial in regulating the operation of the HVAC system to maintain the safe and healthy building conditions; meanwhile, the control system is supposed to be energy efficient in the sense of minimizing the energy consumption by the HVAC system, which comprises of the two main objectives of a control system design for the HVAC system. This project concentrates on the control system design for the model-based HVAC system for the purpose of maintaining the occupants’ thermal comfort while optimizing the energy efficiency. The control strategy for the HVAC control system is based on the Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC), which defines a reference model for the HVAC system according to the desired performance and specifications. The controller is automatically adjusted in the process based on the output difference between the HVAC model and the desired reference model. The adaptive control strategy is compared with the conventional control strategy like proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to demonstrate the control performances in both maintaining the occupants’ thermal comfort and the energy efficiency. The HVAC models and the controllers are configured in MATLAB/Simulink for simulation. The simulation results show that the designed controller based on the adaptive control strategy exhibits better performances in reference tracking and minimizing the energy cost function, indicating the better capabilities of both maintaining the occupants’ thermal comfort and improving energy efficiency.