SRC and its applications to building thermal control

Energy-efficient building design requires, the use of advanced thermal simulation programs and respective complex building models, for the estimation of the annual building energy demand. This complexity, limits the use of such models in model-based building climate control design, mainly because it entails additional difficulty in finding appropriate controllers. To meet the above requirements, a novice climate control method is introduced, which is based on SRC (a building thermal simulation program, which is complex enough for the initial building design phase and at the same time, simple enough for model-based climate control design tasks). In the suggested method, the problem of finding energy-efficient operation schedules of building devices, is formulated as a convex optimization problem and solved using a finite number of iterations, until a certain comfort criterion is met. The method is tested on a two zone building with external and internal openings, where the advantages of inter-zone air mixing and coupled building model thermal dynamics, are taken into account. The obtained operation schedules, when applied to the passive (openings) and active (HVAC) devices of the test building, exhibited higher energy savings than the schedules provided by a rule-based controller, while conforming to the same thermal comfort requirements.