Reducing the energy consumption of an earth-air heat exchanger with a PID control system

Reducing environmental emissions is one of the challenges that human being has to overcome. It can only be reached with a proper energetic efficiency and management of the processes that exist in the society nowadays. Several academic works have mentioned that raising the efficiency of a process it also increases sustainability and in turn decreases the environmental impact. One process that requires much attention is the cooling and heating of buildings; this process contributes to the major part of the electric bill, in particular, if a conventional and old air conditioning is used as commonly occurs in many countries. In recent years there have been developed new alternatives that are used in few countries, such as the earth-air heat exchanger, where air is passed through a heat exchanger buried a few meters below the ground. The heat exchanger takes advantage of the well-known difference between the temperature of the surrounding air and the temperature of the ground for cooling or heating the air that is subsequently injected into the buildings. This process requires less energy, then in the present work is thought that a PID (Proportional, Integral and Derivative) controller can be applied to an earth-air heat exchanger to reduce even more the energy consumption. Therefore, a simulation of a thermodynamic model of an earth-air heat exchanger was done and used along with a PID controller, to estimate savings in energy consumption. The results show that the energy consumption can be reduced up to 87% with the PID control, hence the efficiency of the process is increased as well as the sustainability of the planet and thus the environmental concerns are diminished. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.