Model Predictive Control of Temperature and Humidity in Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning Systems

International audienceThe major application of heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is the simultaneous control of air temperature and air humidity. Therefore, in a typical industrial HVAC plant the following actuators are available: A cooling coil is used to decrease the air temperature and relative humidity by cooling below the dew point temperature. A steam humidifier is installed to increase the air humidity whereas the air temperature is influenced via a heating coil. Additionally, air temperature and humidity are affected by disturbances acting on the system. These disturbances include outer air temperature and humidity as well as the temperatures of hot water and cool water supply. Consequently, in the setup at hand, a plant with three manipulated inputs, four measurable disturbances and two controlled outputs has to be considered. A predictive control scheme based on a discrete time plant model is presented. The proposed controller computes the manipulated variables by solving an optimization problem at each time step. Simulation and measurement results obtained from an industrial HVAC system are shown