Energy Efficient Temperature and Humidity Control in Building Climate Systems

Energy efficient building climate control involves maintaining thermal comfort across a wide range of environmental conditions while minimizing energy usage. However, the design of energy efficient control poses a significant challenge owing to the strong coupling between temperature and humidity. In this work, we present a control oriented model for the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system and provide a polytopic approximation of thermal comfort in terms of temperature and humidity ratio. A novel energy optimal control formulation based on generalized disjunctive programming is proposed to systematically account for the strong coupling effects and latent heat consideration. An extensive simulation study is performed to validate the efficcacy of the proposed control strategy across a wide range of operational and weather conditions.