Intelligent control of thermal comfort in automobile

Saving consumable energy and maintaining the thermal comfort level are two main topics in heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) control field. A controller with temperature feedback can not best achieve these goals. Fangerpsilas ldquopredicted mean voterdquo (PMV) index is commonly used to better describe comfort. Therefore, this paper proposes a simpler form of PMV index for using as fuzzy controller feedback. A fuzzy controller with PMV feedback is first designed for automobile climate control. Next, the membership functions of the fuzzy controller are optimized by genetic algorithm. Finally, robustness analysis is performed to indicate the robustness of optimized controller to variable variation. Results show that the proposed controller not only better controls the thermal comfort but it also reduces energy consumption.