Model-free Control of Building HVAC Systems to Accommodate Solar photovoltaicEnergy

Abstract

With the increasing demand for energy in day-to-day life, the need for integrating renewable energy is growing. In this paper, we take a step in addressing this challenge by employing solar photovoltaic (PV) energy to maintain indoor temperatures in buildings. The objective we aim to meet is to consume as much of the generated PV energy as possible locally while maintaining the indoor comfort temperatures. We set this objective to reduce wastage of renewable energy and cut down the need for storage devices. We formulate a thermal model of the building Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system and employ the model-free control (MFC) technique to achieve the defined objective. Simulation results illustrate that the performance of the MFC technique, in terms of indoor temperature and total energy consumption tracking errors, is comparable with that of the recently developed augmented model predictive control technique. In addition, the MFC is computationally light and easily deployable on small embedded devices. Furthermore, we analyze the relationship between the generated PV energy and the required energy consumption of the buildings, and the results show that this relationship is linear, indicating that the developed framework can be directly implemented for a certain number of buildings given an arbitrary PV profile.

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1109/PEDG.2018.8447664

Journal

2018 9th IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG)

Year

2018