ESTABLISHING THE NEED FOR CONTEXT-AWARE ADAPTIVE CONTROL FOR ENERGY EFFICIENT HVAC SYSTEMS

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings use traditional wall-mounted sensors (e.g., thermostats) to determine room temperature. However, thermostats are located in regions that might not adequately sense the thermal condition an occupant experiences. Despite high energy consumption rates, occupants usually experience thermal discomfort because they are either too hot or too cold. This study focuses on evaluating performance of an existing HVAC system, in addition to improving the thermal comfort of individual occupants in different sub-spaces of a thermal zones. An office configuration of three adjacent rooms was investigated using computational fluid dynamics, which included a solar radiation model. Two control strategies for the air conditioning system were examined. The first one simulates the air conditioning control by using the feedback from a wall-mount thermostat in one of the sub-spaces. The second scenario simulates an air conditioning system centrally controlled by the average temperature of all occupants (e.g.,using distributed feedback from personal comfort models) and provides better overall thermal comfort.