Physics-based modeling and identification for HVAC systems?

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are among the largest energy consumers in many buildings. As is known, modeling and identification play important roles in the study of HVAC systems. A good model is very helpful for improving efficiency of the HVAC system. Very recently, a physics-based model of room temperature was proposed. Motivated by this inspiring work, this paper, based on the physical dynamical systems, proposes, identifies and validates three models for CO₂ concentration, temperature and humidity of a test-bed room, respectively. Particularly, our models take into account the effect of occupiers, since the indoor air quality (IAQ) is evidently affected by the number of occupiers. A test-bed has been set up for experiments in a laboratory room on KTH campus. Experimental results verify that our proposed method improves the performance of the physics-based linear parametric models.