Building temperature control using an enhanced MRAC approach

One crucial aspect in building engineering is to accomplish the trade-off between reduction of energy consumption and high level thermal comfort for the occupants. To this aim, advanced control algorithms are fundamental to guarantee a certain optimality of the system performance in working conditions that can be quite different from the nominal ones due to the presence, for example, of variable external wheatear conditions or parameter uncertainties. To impose an optimal behavior of the indoor air temperature while assuring robustness to plant parameter uncertainties and external disturbances, in this paper we propose an extension of the optimal model reference adaptive scheme presented in [6] that embeds additional adaptive actions to improve tracking performance. Performance of the novel strategy are investigated both analytically, by exploiting hyperstability theory, and numerically. In particular the numerical validation has been carried out by using a detailed thermal-hygrometric simulation code (DETEC 2.1). Results confirm the effectiveness of the control in exemplar case of studies referred to buildings of different sizes and located in different European weather zones.