A CFD-based test method for control of indoor environment in air-conditioned rooms

Because of the complexity of the indoor dynamic thermal environment, several kinds of simplified surrogate models, such as zone model and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) based reduced-order model, have been developed for fast simulation and control purpose. To test and calibrate the performance of such models, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based test method is presented in this paper. The proposed virtual test model combines a CFD-based air-conditioned room with a single neuron adaptive PID controller, which is programmed using the user-defined function and embedded in the CFD model. Additionally, a space temperature offset model is developed using least squares estimation (LSE). This offset model is used to compensate the temperature difference between actual sensor locations and occupied zones. Test studies not only show the great interoperation between the PID controller and the CFD simulation but also demonstrate the acceptable accuracy of the LSE-based temperature estimation.