1 research outputs found
Distributed Control of Multi-zone HVAC Systems Considering Indoor Air Quality
This paper studies a scalable control method for multi-zone heating,
ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to optimize the energy cost for
maintaining thermal comfort and indoor air quality (IAQ) (represented by CO2)
simultaneously. This problem is computationally challenging due to the complex
system dynamics, various spatial and temporal couplings as well as multiple
control variables to be coordinated. To address the challenges, we propose a
two-level distributed method (TLDM) with a upper level and lower level control
integrated. The upper level computes zone mass flow rates for maintaining zone
thermal comfort with minimal energy cost, and then the lower level
strategically regulates zone mass flow rates and the ventilation rate to
achieve IAQ while preserving the near energy saving performance of upper level.
As both the upper and lower level computation are deployed in a distributed
manner, the proposed method is scalable and computationally efficient. The
near-optimal performance of the method in energy cost saving is demonstrated
through comparison with the centralized method. In addition, the comparisons
with the existing distributed method show that our method can provide IAQ with
only little increase of energy cost while the latter fails. Moreover, we
demonstrate our method outperforms the demand controlled ventilation strategies
(DCVs) for IAQ management with about 8-10% energy cost reduction.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure