Journal article
Development of a Hardware-in-theloop Testbed for Laboratory Performance Verification of Flexible Building Equipment in Typical Commercial Buildings
ASHRAE transactions, Vol.128, pp.237-245
01 Jan 2022
Abstract
The goals of reducing energy costs, shifting electricity peaks, increasing the use of renewable energy, and enhancing the stability of the electric grid can be met in part by fully exploiting the energy flexibility potential of buildings and building equipment. The development of strategies that exploit these flexibilities could be facilitated by publicly available high-resolution datasets illustrating how control of HVAC systems in commercial buildings can be used in different climate zones to shape the energy use profile of a building for grid needs. This article presents the development and integration of a Hardware-In-the-Loop Flexible load Testbed (HILFT) that integrates physical HVAC systems with a simulated building model and simulated occupants with the goal of generating datasets to verify load flexibility of typical commercial buildings. Compared to simulation-only experiments, the hardware-in-the-loop approach captures the dynamics of the physical systems while also allowing efficient testing of various boundary conditions. The HILFT integration in this article is achieved through the co-simulation among various software environments including LabVIEW, MATLAB, and EnergyPlus. Although theoretically viable, such integration has encountered many real-world challenges, such as: 1) how to design the overall data infrastructure to ensure effective, robust, and efficient integration; 2) how to avoid closed-loop hunting between simulated and emulated variables; 3) how to quantify system response times and minimize system delays; and 4) how to assess the overall integration quality. Lessons-learned using the examples of an AHU-VAV system, an air-source heat pump system, and a water-source heat pump system are presented.
Metrics
1 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Development of a Hardware-in-theloop Testbed for Laboratory Performance Verification of Flexible Building Equipment in Typical Commercial Buildings
- Creators
- Zhelun ChenL JamesAmanda PertzbornGabriel GrajewskiJin WenZheng O'NeillCaleb CalfaYicheng LiSteven BushbyW PayneYangyang FuZhiyao Yang
- Publication Details
- ASHRAE transactions, Vol.128, pp.237-245
- Publisher
- American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, Inc
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
- Identifiers
- 991021960648604721