Design and Implementation of Closed-loop PI Control Strategies in Real-time MATLAB Simulation Environment for Nonlinear and Linear ARMAX Models of HVAC Centrifugal Chiller Control Systems

摘要

The objective of this paper is to investigate three different approaches of modeling, design and discrete-time implementation of PI closed-loop control strategies in SIMULINK simulation environment, applied to a centrifugal chiller system. Centrifugal chillers are widely used in large building HVAC systems. The system consists of an evaporator, a condenser, a centrifugal compressor and an expansion valve. The overall system is an interconnection of two main control loops, namely the chilled water temperature inside the evaporator, and the refrigerant liquid level control in condenser. The centrifugal chiller dynamics model in a discrete-time state-space representation is of high complexity in terms of dimension and encountered nonlinearities. For simulation purpose the centrifugal chiller model is simplified by using different approaches, especially the development of linear polynomials ARMAX and ARX models. The aim to build linear ARMAX models for centrifugal chiller is to simplify considerable the control design strategies that are investigated in this research paper. The novelty of this research is a new controller design approach, more precisely an improved version of proportional – integral control, the so called Proportional-Integral-Plus control for systems with time delay, based on linear ARMAX models. It is conceived within the context of non-minimum state space control system that “seems to be the natural description of a discrete-time transfer function, since its dimension is dictated by the complete structure of the model”. The effectiveness of this new controller design, its implementation simplicity, convergence speed and robustness are proved in the last section of the paper.