Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Comfort Control Techniques
for the Users of a Room
Abstract
This chapter presents several control strategies developed aimed at obtain-
ing an optimal comfort situation for the users of a building, minimising, at the same
time, the energy consumption necessary to achieve this comfort situation. Therefore,
this chapter focuses on the development and implementation of some control strate-
gies which satisfy this objective. More specifically, hierarchical, linear model-based
predictive control, nonlinear model predictive control and multivariable model pre-
dictive control strategies are presented. Furthermore, real results obtained from the
application of the developed control strategies inside a characteristic room of the
CDdI-CIESOL-ARFRISOL building are included and discussed.
5.1 Introduction
In the early works about climatic control for the users of a building, only the
temperature control was performed (Flóres
1985
; Flóres and Barney
1987a
,
b
).
This research line is still under development, leading to different control systems as
the solutions obtained in the control benchmark proposed and developed by the Uni-
versity of Seville inside the European research project HYbrid CONtrol (HYCON),
where an HVAC system with an absorption machine similar to the one available
inside the CDdI-CIESOL-ARFRISOL building is used (Menchinelli and Bemporad
2008
; Rodríguez et al.
2008
; Sonntag et al.
2008
; Zambrano and García-Gabin
2008
).
An alternative to temperature control is direct control of thermal comfort by means
of some indices, such as the PMV index which depends on temperature among other
variables.
However, comfort control can be considered a multivariable problem (Bernard
and Kuntze
1999
; Dounis and Caraiscos
2009
; Guo and Zhou
2009
), which does
not have a unique solution, especially inside bioclimatic buildings. As was men-
tioned previously, the main objective expected with the use of advanced control
systems inside buildings, is to obtain high thermal comfort, visual comfort and
