Energy and Building Management
Researchers: Josefin Berner, Meike Stemmann, Anders Rantzer
Funding: ELLIT excellence center, LCCC Linnaeus center
Buildings account for 40 % of total energy consumption in the European Union, in Sweden one third of the energy used is related to the building sector, and 60% of the energy used in buildings is for heating and ventilation. With a growing building sector, it is necessary to decrease the energy used by heating and ventilation in buildings, so the total energy used in the buildings sector is not increased. Improved control and management of heating and ventilation systems in buildings can help to decrease the energy usage.
This project aims at improving the temperature control in buildings, especially using PID control and Model Predictive Control (MPC). One approach involves automatic tuning of PID controllers (for more details on automatic tuning see Automatic Tuning). To perform well for temperature control, PID controllers must be tuned correctly, which is often not the case in practice. Automatic tuning can help to overcome this problem. The automatic tuning procedure developed in the project has been tested on an industrial air handling unit with good results.
Another approach is to investigate the temperature interaction between different rooms or zones in a building. Usually, each room would be controlled by a local controller (e.g. On/Off-control or PID). However, the temperature dynamics of adjacent rooms or zones have an influence on each other, which can be significant. To take this interaction into account, the local PID controllers are connected with a decoupling network in order to improve temperature control and occupant comfort.
2016-03-30