Fan pressure control in HVAC

Abstract

Heat Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is the major energy consumer in the commercial building. It can account for up to 40% of the total energy consumption. One of the prominent ways in reducing energy consumption is by using the Chilled Beam technology that uses water as the medium to extract heat from spaces as compared to the convention air technology (e.g.: fans).

The Chilled Beam technology has proven to be energy efficient and had been largely deployed in the Scandinavia region but it has not picked up in the tropical countries. Recent developments of the chilled beam are specially designed for the tropical climate in order to overcome the limitations of previous generation Chilled Beam technology.

In this study, the modelling of the fan will be analyzed using LABView System Design to acquire the plant step responses and determine its model with the empirical modelling method using MATLAB. This would be time saving and simplify the modelling process of the Air Handling Unit that is required for the tropical chilled beam technology which require active air support for its terminal units.

On top of that, different control strategies are deployed to study the characteristic of the controller using offline (simulation) using MATLAB Simulation and online (actual plant) LABView System Design Software. Results have shown that using the offline method is fast, accurate and yet simple. This will bring further benefits to the study when extensive modelling is further required for different setup in the future.