Efficient Water Supply in HVAC Systems

An air conditioning automatic control system or simply a control system, primarily modulates the capacity of the air conditioning equipment to maintain predetermined parameter(s) within an enclosure of the fluid entering or leaving the equipment to meet the load and climate changes at optimum energy consumption and safe operation. As it is known, the HVAC system is a nonlinear system and its strongly coupled parameters change. Thus, classical HVAC control techniques can not be optimal solutions. HAVC systems can be categorized in three main configurations:

primary only systems
primary-secondary systems
primary-secondary-tertiary systems
In this project we deal with primary-secondary systems.
The porpose of this project is to eliminate all the valves and to use a variable flow pump instead. By using this pump, the HVAC system can be supplied by (hot or cold) water in an efficient way regarding the set points. As was described, the palnt is multi-variable, nonlinear, and time-varying. Inputs of the palnt are either hot or cold water flow and air flow that will be controlled by variable flow pump and variable speed fans respectively. The output of the plant is desired room temperature. The cost function is energy consumption. As a result, the controller of the plant will be an advanced (likely nonlinear) robust model-based controller. Finally, we expect the resulting system to be cheaper and more energy efficient.