Simplified Thermal Model and Optimal Control for Chilled Water Pipe in Air-Conditioning System

As an important subsystem in air-conditioning system, water system connects the chiller and terminal equipment. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an accurate thermal model for chilled water pipe to create the suitable indoor temperature and humidity environment. In this paper, the thermal model of the pipe was considered by utilizing the simplified thermal time-delay state-space model with the mass, energy balance, and heat consumption equations. Based on this improved model, the preview control as control strategy for water pipe temperature was proposed, and its robustness and stability were discussed. Subsequently, the performances of this model and control strategy were tested in a fan-coil system simulating with MATLAB and TRNSYS (Transient System Simulation Program). Explicitly, the results show that this model accurately predicts the thermal characteristic, and the average mean squared errors for water temperature were 11.14% and 12.82%, respectively. Meanwhile, the tracking effect of valve controller was better than the control strategy with no preview control.