Fuzzy Logic Based Controller for Maintaining Human Comfort within Intelligent Building System

Abstract

This paper presents an intelligent control approach for air handling unit (AHU) which is an integral part of heat, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. In the past years various control design for HVAC have been proposed as this system remarkably consumes very high energy. But most of the proposed designs were focused on the control flow of heat-transfer medium such as chilled or heated water while the importance of the efficient mixture of outdoor and indoor enthalpies is sometimes ignored. These enthalpies invariably determine the best strategy to overcome thermal load in a controlled environment to satisfy human comfort, hence a control design strategy must be able to efficiently regulate the flow and mixture of outdoor and indoor enthalpies by a proper control of AHU dampers and fans. This approach requires sensors to measure temperature and relative humidity of both outdoor and indoor environments. However, unpredictable level of disturbances coming from many sources including heat generated by occupants, electrical items and air leaking and the continuous changes of outdoor enthalpy makes it difficult to model the process. Consequently, conventional controllers are not suitable, hence the use of fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is proposed in this paper. This proposed controller operates in a master and slave control loop so as to control the AHU dampers and fans with adjustable output membership function whilst at the same time a scaling-factor method is used to drive the master operation. To implement the proposed system, a small scale prototype has been designed and fabricated. This prototype is an AHU model which consists of ductwork, temperature and humidity sensors, dampers, air cooling and heating systems. A small box is used as a conditioning space in which a room temperature is measured. The control algorithm is programmed using National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW and executed using NI FieldPoint. Experimental results reveal that proper control of AHU dampers and fans is an effective and practical means to satisfy human comfort with minimum energy consumption.
Keywords: Human comfort, Intelligent control, Air handling unit, Adaptive fuzzy logic control