A model-based control strategy to recover cooling energy from thermal mass in commercial buildings

Kui Shan, Jiayuan Wang, Maomao Hu and Dian-ce Gao

Energy, 2019, vol. 172, issue C, 958-967

Abstract: Building structures and furniture have the capability of storing thermal energy and therefore could be called building thermal mass. In commercial buildings, room conditions remain in thermal comfort zone for a while after the end of office hours when the air-conditioning systems are tuned off. It is possible to recover the stored cooling energy from building thermal mass in commercial buildings. This study proposes a model-based control strategy for such purpose. A simplified building RC model and a black-box model are combined by a simple data fusion algorithm for easier implementation and more accuracy prediction. The feasibility of such energy recovery was validated on-site in a super high-rise commercial building in Hong Kong, and the proposed method was validated on a dynamic simulation platform built based on the same building. In the two on-site validations, the energy savings during the energy recovering period were 85.8% and 80.1%, respectively. In the simulation tests, by allowing indoor air temperature increase by 1 K, the proposed control strategy could save 83.8% of the cooling energy during the recovering period, which accounts for 7.23% of the total cooling energy consumption in the entire tested days.

Keywords: HVAC; Building thermal mass; Building energy conservation; Energy recovery; Demand limiting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:172:y:2019:i:c:p:958-967

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.02.045

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