Extremum Seeking Based Control Strategy for a Chilled-Water Plant With Parallel Chillers

Abstract

Chilled-water plants with multiple chillers are the backbone of ventilation and air conditioning (VAC) systems for commercial buildings. A penalty function based multivariate extremum seeking control (ESC) strategy is proposed in this paper for maximizing the energy efficiency in real time for a variable primary flow (VPF) chilled-water plant with parallel chillers. The proposed ESC algorithm takes the total power consumption (chiller compressors + cooling tower fan + condenser water pumps + penalty terms if inputs saturation occurs) as feedback, and tower fan air flow, condenser water flows and evaporator leaving chilled-water temperature setpoint as plant inputs (ESC outputs). A band-pass filter array is used in place of the conventional high-pass filter at the plant output so as to reduce the cross-channel interference. Chiller sequencing is also enabled with input saturation related signals. A Modelica based dynamic simulation model is developed for a chilled-water plant with two parallel chillers, one cooling tower, one air-handling unit and one zone. Simulation results under several testing conditions validate the effectiveness of the proposed model-free control strategy, as well as the significant energy saving.