Reference
L. A. de Araujo Passos,
T. J. Ceha, S. Baldi, and B. De Schutter, "Model
predictive control of a thermal chimney and dynamic solar shades for an
all-glass facades building,"
Energy, vol. 264, p.
126177, Feb. 2023.
Abstract
Controlling the operation of HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning)
systems is arguably the most effective way to reach desired indoor conditions
in buildings. Nevertheless, such control may involve complex dynamics when
dealing with passive energy technologies. In this paper, we focus on maximizing
the passive operation of HVAC in a novel low-energy building design by means of
Model Predictive Control (MPC). The low-energy building design, located in The
Green Village, consists of a thermal chimney and solar shades over all-glass
facades to provide the required indoor air conditioning as passively as
possible. The MPC controller is based on a transient grey box model and a
hierarchical control architecture to satisfy thermal comfort while minimizing
the active energy requirements. Using sensor data collected from the actual
building in April and May 2021, the grey box model shows a good agreement with
the measurements, since the variance accounted for is 90% in most cases.
Moreover, via a comparative study among different MPC architectures we show
that managing the distinct transient response of each component (shades and
chimney) is the best for successful overall performance - e.g., considering
linear agents for shading and nonlinear agents for ventilation. The
hierarchical MPC architecture established outperforms the standard ones by
22.7% in terms of control performance. We also compare the proposed MPC
approach against the rule-based control method currently implemented in the
actual building, which indicates that MPC demands about 78% less active energy,
highlighting the proposed optimization-based control approach.
Publisher page
Downloads
BibTeX
@article{deACeh:23-017,
author = {de Araujo Passos, Luigi Antonio and Ceha, Thomas Joseph and
Baldi, Simone and De Schutter, Bart},
title = {Model Predictive Control of a Thermal Chimney and Dynamic Solar
Shades for an All-Glass Facades Building},
journal = {Energy},
volume = {264},
pages = {126177},
month = feb,
year = {2023}
}