Key
3211
Conference Year
2012
Keywords
Extremum Seeking Control, Chilled-Water System, Dynamic Modeling, Modelica
Abstract
The chilled-water systems, mainly consisting of electric chillers and cooling towers, are crucial for the ventilating and air conditioning systems in commercial buildings. Energy efficient operation of such systems is thus important for the energy saving of commercial buildings. This paper presents an extremum seeking control (ESC) scheme for energy efficient operation of the chilled-water system, and presents a Modelica based dynamic simulation model for demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. The simulated plant consists of a water-cooled screw chiller and a mechanical-draft counter-flow wet cooling tower. The ESC scheme takes the total power consumption of the chiller compressor and the tower fan as feedback, and uses the fan speed setting as the control input. The inner-loop controllers for the chiller operation include two proportional-integral (PI) control loops for regulating the evaporator superheat and the chilled water temperature. Simulation was conducted on the dynamic simulation model of the whole plant including the screw chiller and the cooling tower for different scenarios. The simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ESC strategy in searching for the optimal tower fan speed set-point under tested circumstances, and the potential for energy saving is also evaluated.