Development of simulator for pressure controlled cooling pumps

This paper proposes a simulation model of pressure control of cooling pumps used for air-conditioners. To ensure proper working of cooling pumps for air-conditioning, proper control on pump activation and speed needs to be enforced. Control can be applied by various means. One way is to use input water flow quantity to determine the number of activated pumps. But due to the relatively high cost of sensors, output pressure signal can be used instead via a much cheaper pressure sensor. This work will concentrate on building a simulator to model pressure controlled pumps. It acts as a preliminary work to simulate the actual physical system such that further analysis on pressure-controlled pumps can be performed much easily. We conduct preliminary experiments to compare the similarity between the simulation model and the actual physical system. Preliminary experimental results show that the simulation model can produce signals quite similar to those produced by the actual system.