An Indoor Dynamic Thermal Comfort Control Method

The paper discusses the importance and necessity of indoor dynamic thermal comfort, traditional thermal comfort control method can not meet the thermal comfort needs of different households and it favors energy-saving of the air-conditioning system. Indoor air relative humidity of an inhabited environment, cooled by a domestic air-conditioner, is mainly influenced by indoor and outdoor humidity and temperature, and dehumidification characteristics of the air-conditioner, and the relationship between the parameters is nonlinear and strong coupling, hardly to be mathematically modeled. Therefore, it is very difficult to design a PMV based thermal comfort control system with high performance.A 1-day model and a 3-day model to express the relationship among indoor and outdoor environmental parameters (temperature and humidity) and predict indoor relative humidity are built base on CMAC neural network. Simulations demonstrate that the presented method has high learning accuracy and generalization ability, and it can relatively accurately predict the indoor air humidity. Compared with the 3-day model, the 1-day model has higher learning precision, generalization ability and prediction accuracy, and it provides a basis for the calculation of indoor temperature set points based on computing experiment.A computing experimental method is explored to determine temperature set points of the domestic air-conditioner. The thermal comfort control method can adaptively meet the inhabitants'comfort needs by environmental sample data learning and simple and convenient computing experiment without a mathematic model of dehumidification characteristics of the air-conditioner or outdoor thermal model. The presented methods can control the PMV at desired level according to inhabitant's thermal sensation by appropriately adjusting temperature set points.Considering the deficiency of the traditional PID control method, fuzzy control theory is used to design a fuzzy PID controller, and it makes up for the shortcomings of traditional PID control method. Simulations demonstrate that the control method has small overshoot and shot transition time compared with traditional PID control method, and it is more suitable for indoor thermal comfort control.Finally, a dynamic thermal comfort control method is presented, the dynamical thermal comfort zone includes comfort zone and energy saving zone which changed periodically, and it achieves maximum energy savings under the premise of thermal comfort need of the households. The temperature factor is mainly considered. The control method changes the human thermal comfort through appropriate regulation of indoor temperature, and the PMV value is changed relatively. The experiment results demonstrated that this method could meet the human's thermal comfort need and reduce the energy consumption to 23.8%, energy-saving effect is more obvious, and the dynamic thermal comfort control method is feasible and effective.