SMART INDOOR THERMAL COMFORT CONTROL

Abstract

Current research in building performance is giving more attention to strategies to improve HVAC system performance to ensure healthy indoor ventilation and comfort conditioning. An efficient control is required to minimize the energy usage input based on defined occupants’ thermal comfort constraint to achieve this goal. Over the years Smart Home Energy Management System (SHEMs) solutions have been used to control the performance of HVAC systems through advanced control strategies whereby ambient conditions and building energy profiles become an integral part of the system. However, recent investigation reveals most of the SHEMs are based on ambient temperature and humidity constraints which cannot fully reflect precise thermal comfort sensation and result in higher discomfort situations and energy usage. To improve the current approaches the study considered more input parameter constraints including occupancy number, reference comfort level, and electricity price modeled using discrete-time models for the control system. Quadratic cost function design for linear optimal control systems is employed to optimize desired temperature setpoint outputs to maximize thermal comfort and lower the energy consumption cost. To test and evaluate the proposed approach’s performance, a real-time price electricity scheme was used. The result analysis shows the proposed method achieved comfort conditioning with lower energy input and discomfort situations compared to previous approaches. © (2023), (Procedia Environmental Science). All rights reserved.