Switch On/Interruption Control of Cooling Based on Estimated Acceptable Interruption Duration: An Office Case Study in Japan

摘要

Since space cooling accounts for some proportion of energy consumption in hot regions, including in the United States and Japan, energy-saving and demand response for space cooling are important, and interruption of air conditioner cooling may be one solution. In this paper, we propose a space-cooling scheduling control method using interruptions of an acceptable duration. The proposed method estimates the acceptable interruption duration based on survival analysis by treating air conditioner operations by occupants as an indicator of their thermal comfort. In the proposed method, use of the air conditioner is interrupted by turning it off (off mode) or switching it to fan mode. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted a case study of an office in Japan during the summer. From the experimental results, we determined that acceptable interruption durations were 10 min for off mode and 20 min for fan mode. Use of fan mode in the proposed method may provide some energy-savings (9%), whereas use of off mode may increase the energy consumption compared with usual cooling because the interruption duration is so short that the energy consumed upon restarting cooling cannot be canceled out by the interruption.