Design and Instrumentation of an Intelligent Building Testbed

Abstract

This paper presents the design and instrumentation of a 3:5-scale physical testbed of an intelligent building. The testbed is designed to enable performance evaluation of various temperature control algorithms in a controlled and repeatable setting. Key features of this testbed include fully controlled mass flow and supply air temperature, a sensor-rich environment (producing both temperature and energy measurements), control of the ambient temperature around the testbed, and a modular structure with multiple zones and varying degrees of thermal and mass flow coupling. The testbed is partitioned into 6 rooms; the interconnected structure of these rooms allows us to study the thermal coupling that occurs between adjacent zones and to explore the challenges associated with under-actuated zones. Air conditioning is provided by wall mounted thermoelectric coolers controlled wirelessly from a central computer. A unique feature of this testbed is its placement inside a larger temperature-controlled enclosure, which allows simulation of time-varying ambient weather. Precise control of ambient temperature provides a means for robust comparison and evaluation of control architectures. As a preliminary demonstration, we present experimental results comparing the performance of a decentralized proportional-integral controller and a decentralized adaptive controller under time-varying ambient temperature.

Reference
M. Minakais, S. Mishra, J.T. Wen, L. Lagace, T. Castiglia (2015). Design and Instrumentation of an Intelligent Building Testbed IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Gothenburg, Sweden, Aug, 2015.