Model-free Control of Building HVAC Systems to Accommodate Solar Photovoltaic Energy

Abstract

With the increasing demand for energy in day-today life, the need for integrating renewable energy is growing. In this paper, we take a step in addressing the issue by employing solar photovoltaic (PV) energy to maintain indoor temperatures in buildings. The objective we aim to meet is to use as much of the generated PV energy as possible while maintaining the indoor comfort temperatures. We set this objective in order to reduce wastage of renewable energy and cut down the need for storage devices. We formulate a thermal model of the building HVAC system and employ the model-free control (MFC) technique to achieve the defined objective. Although recently introduced, MFC has shown promising results in various domains and it is more appealing due to its light computational complexity. Furthermore, we analyze the relationship between the generated PV energy and the total energy consumption of the buildings. The results show that the aforementioned relationship is linear in nature as the number of buildings increases.