Automated investigation, evaluation and optimisation of simple heating circuits in building automation

Abstract

The majority of all control devices of heating circuits, which are maintained by the building management of the city of Cologne, was set according to standard parameters and for this reason show either very slow control behaviour or an increased tendency to oscillate. Specialists who can only optimise the controllers of these systems at great expense of time are often not available. By optimising the controller parameters, however, the controller performance, which is part of the overall building performance, can be improved. This paper deals with a developed system solution that can automatically investigate, evaluate and optimise simple heating circuits with PTn behaviour. The system solution has already evaluated the controller performance of 24 heating circuits from five schools in the city of Cologne. 54% of the rated heating circuits have very sluggish control behaviour and 4% are poorly tuned. The remaining 42% have an intermediate control behaviour. Two schools were also optimised in addition to the evaluation of the control behaviour. After optimisation, six out of eight heating circuits were rated better by at least one performance class than in the initial state.