Distributed Temperature Control via Geothermal Heat Pump Systems in Energy Efficient Buildings

摘要

Geothermal Heat Pump (GHP) systems are heating and cooling systems that usethe ground as the temperature exchange medium. GHP systems are becoming moreand more popular in recent years due to their high efficiency. Conventionalcontrol schemes of GHP systems are mainly designed for buildings with a singlethermal zone. For large buildings with multiple thermal zones, those controlschemes either lose efficiency or become costly to implement requiring a lot ofreal-time measurement, communication and computation. In this paper, we focuson developing energy efficient control schemes for GHP systems in buildingswith multiple zones. We present a thermal dynamic model of a building equippedwith a GHP system for floor heating/cooling and formulate the GHP systemcontrol problem as a resource allocation problem with the objective to maximizeuser comfort in different zones and to minimize the building energyconsumption. We then propose real-time distributed algorithms to solve thecontrol problem. Our distributed multi-zone control algorithms are scalable anddo not need to measure or predict any exogenous disturbances such as theoutdoor temperature and indoor heat gains. Thus, it is easy to implement themin practice. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposedcontrol schemes.