A Comprehensive Evaluation Method for Air-Conditioning System Plants Based on Building Performance Simulation and Experiment Information

Abstract

During the design stage of an HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system in a construction project, designers must decide on the most workable design scheme for the plant room in the building based on the evaluation of multiple aspects related to system performance that need to be considered, such as energy efficiency, economic effectiveness, etc. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation method for the plant rooms of centralized air-conditioning systems in commercial buildings. This new method consists of two analyses used in tandem: Building Performance Simulation (BPS) models and a collection of real HVAC design cases (the carried-out design solutions). The BPS models and a knowledge of the reduction approach based on Rough Set (RS) theory are used to generate data and weight factors for the indices of energy efficiency; and the real design cases are employed with a heuristic algorithm to extract the compiled empirical information for other evaluation items of the centralized HVAC system. In addition, this paper also demonstrates an application in an actual case of a building construction project. By comparing the expert decision-making process and the evaluation results, it is found that they are basically consistent, which verifies the reasonability of the comprehensive evaluation method.

Fault Injection with Multiple Fault Patterns for Experimental Evaluation of Demand-Controlled Ventilation and Heating Systems

“…The experimental evaluation of HVAC systems in the design phase is an important subject [ 17 ] to enhance the system’s efficiency, resource usage [ 18 ], economic effectiveness [ 19 ], thermal comfort [ 20 ], and reduce CO 2 emissions [ 6 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Extensive research has presented experimental evaluations of energy consumption for HVAC systems.…”

“…Experimental evaluations of HVAC systems were carried out in [ 19 , 20 , 23 , 24 ] to monitor the system behavior in the presence of faults. However, in the field of DCV and heating systems, the experimental evaluations of multiple faults in combination with different environmental conditions have not been published and no such experimental data is available.…”