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Neuro-optimal operation of a variable air volume HVAC&R system.

Author(s) : NING M., ZAHEERUDDIN M.

Type of article: Article

Summary

Low operational efficiency especially under partial load conditions and poor control are some reasons for high energy consumption of heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R) systems. To improve energy efficiency, HVAC&R systems should be efficiently operated to maintain a desired indoor environment under dynamic ambient and indoor conditions. This study proposes a neural network based optimal supervisory operation strategy to find the optimal set points for chilled water supply temperature, discharge air temperature and VAV system fan static pressure such that the indoor environment is maintained with the least chiller and fan energy consumption. To achieve this objective, a dynamic system model is developed first to simulate the system behaviour under different control schemes and operating conditions. A multi-layer feed forward neural network is constructed and trained in unsupervised mode to minimize the cost function which is comprised of overall energy cost and penalty cost when one or more constraints are violated. After training, the network is implemented as a supervisory controller to compute the optimal settings for the system. Simulation results show that compared to the conventional night reset operation scheme, the optimal operation scheme saves around 10% energy under full load condition and 19% energy under partial load conditions. [Reprinted with permission from Elsevier. Copyright, 2009].

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