INDOOR HUMAN THERMAL COMFORT OPTIMAL CONTROL WITH DESICCANT WHEEL COOLING SYSTEM

Human thermal comfort is an important concern in the energy management of commercial buildings. Human thermal comfort research focuses mostly on the temperature control or the humidity control while based on human thermal comfort index control is ignored. In this paper, an optimal human thermal comfort control model (OHTCM) for a desiccant wheel cooling system is presented for the dehumidification and cooling of a commercial building in summer seasons. The OHTCM has two objectives. The first objective of the OHTCM is to minimize the predicted percentage of dissatisfied (PPD) which is the human thermal comfort index, and the second objective is to minimize the power consumption of the desiccant wheel cooling system. Model predictive control (MPC) strategy has the ability to handle constraints, being able to use simple models and to change controls dynamically in terms of temperature, humidity and air velocity changes, which makes it very practical to use in indoor human thermal comfort control problem. Therefore, MPC strategy is applied to implement the optimal operation of the desiccant wheel cooling system during working hours of the commercial building. To illustrate the practical applications of the MPC strategy, the optimization of the desiccant wheel cooling system in a commercial building of South Africa is studied. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.