Extremum seeking control of cooling tower for self-optimizing efficient operation of chilled water systems

This paper presents an extremum seeking control (ESC) scheme for energy efficient operation of chilled-water system, and Modelica based dynamic simulation models for demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. The simulated plant consists of a water-cooled screw chiller and a mechanical-draft counter-flow wet cooling tower. The ESC scheme takes the total power consumption of chiller compressor and tower fan as feedback, and uses the fan speed setting as control input. The inner-loop controllers for the chiller operation include two PI control loops for regulating the evaporator superheat and the chilled water temperature. Simulation was conducted for different scenarios. The simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ESC strategy, and the potential for energy saving is also evaluated. Also investigated is the ESC windup issue caused by the limitation of the fan´s maximum operation speed. A back-calculation anti-windup ESC scheme is applied and its effectiveness is validated by simulation results.