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ABSTRACT HEADING
Small commercial buildings use multiple Roof Top Units to condition their open space. Therefore, it is hard to disseminate the individual effects of indoor and outdoor disturbance factors. This work studies the influence of these factors on energy consumption in a cooling season for energy efficiency practices. Because of the interaction between the units in an open space, an optimal controller needs to be constructed using a reduced order model, that captures the predictions from computationalfluid dynamics. The sensitivity of the cooling cost to the variation in the input variables, in a globalfashion, is determined using Polynomial Chaos Expansion.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
Growth in population, increase of comfort levels and increase of indoor activities place growing demands on the world energy use in buildings. This raises concerns about the exhaustion of resources and heavy environmental impacts. Therefore, energy efficiency in buildings is a timely and crucial universal issue. Since the highest component of energy use is Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning, any small energy saving effort, will be highly significant. Small to medium commercial buildings suvh as restaurants, stores and office use multiple Roof Top Units (RTUs) to condition their open space. Open spaces are also hard to efficiently control because indoor and outdoor disturbances require additional cooling loads.
In (Ben Ayed et al, 2016), the authors have established a model to control the set point temperature in this setting. The interaction between RTUs is generally difficult to simulate using a lumped model, thus needs to be addressed using a model that incorporates special locality such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Our model uses the distributed dynamic responses...