Optimization on ACC Systems and Layout Design for Maximizing Thermal Comfort and Energy Saving in Large Rooms - A Case Study

• Published in: 2019 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) pp. 654 - 659
• Main Authors: Qiao, Yan, Zhang, SiWei, Wu, NaiQi, Li, ZhiWu
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2019
• Subjects: Building; energy saving; Floors; HVAC; Layout; Libraries; PSO; Temperature distribution; Temperature sensors; thermal sensation
• DOI: 10.1109/CEC.2019.8790095

A public room in buildings could hold a number of persons who may prefer dissimilar thermal environment. Different areas in such rooms may have different temperatures. Facility layout in such a room has effect on the distribution of the people in the room, thus it may affect its thermal environment. It is meaningful and challenging to effectively operate an air-conditioning control (ACC) system by taking the above mentioned factors into account such that the thermal environment is improved and energy is saved. This work aims at optimally operating an ACC system and designing the facility layout so as to maximize the total thermal satisfaction rate (TSR) as well as energy saving. To do so, with a large library room at Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) as a case scenario, an investigation with a large number of experiments is conducted to collect necessary data. Based on the data, regression analysis is done to predict its indoor temperatures in different areas and TSR at a given temperature. Then, we propose a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm such that an optimal or near-optimal solution can be efficiently found. By numerical results, it is observed that the proposed method can significantly improve the total TSR and save energy.