Estimating the energy demand of industrial HVAC

The goal of this dissertation was to construct a model to estimate the Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) energy demand for industrial establishments. There are models available that analyze the energy demand for a commercial or residential building, given building geometry, envelope construction, HVAC equipment, lighting, and usage schedules. Because of the significant heat gain of the industrial processes and the heterogeneity of the industrial establishments, directly applying those models would generate inaccurate results. A parametric study of a generic industrial plant was carried out using regression analysis to relate the pseudo-data to the energy demand of industrial HVAC. The resulting model can be used as a tool to discover the impact of change in process heat efficiency on HVAC demand. It is concluded that the higher internal heat gains cause higher electricity consumption for air-conditioning and lowers gas usage for heating. This conclusion was partly verified by using data from the “Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey”