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Building thermal model development of typical house in U.S. for virtual storage control of aggregated building loads based on...

by Borui Cui, Jeffrey D Munk, Roderick K Jackson, David L Fugate, Michael R Starke
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
30th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimisation, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems
Publication Date
Conference Name
EFFICIENCY, COST, OPTIMIZATION, SIMULATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF ENERGY SYSTEMS
Conference Location
San Diego, California, United States of America
Conference Date
-

A building thermal model is an essential component for achieving optimal control of a building’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). A self-learning grey-box model has been developed by implementing data-driven techniques and utilizing limited available information about the building. In previous research, detailed foreknown knowledge/information, e.g. physical and thermal properties of building materials, as well as sufficient number of observation points, e.g. indoor temperature sensors in different zones, are available for making the decision of model structure and parameters searching range easier. The availability of measured data and a narrowed searching range of model parameters, e.g. resistance and capacity for each wall, made the adopted algorithms quickly achieve near optimal values, which closely approximate the actual heat transfer of a building. Meanwhile, the details of pre-processing of the key inputs were seldom explained. Compared to the previous research, in this study, the available information is assumed to be limited which can fill the requirement for large scale virtual storage control of real residential community in near future, where it may be impractically or over time-consuming to acquire the detailed information for each single house. The developed model is validated by comparing the results to measured data in a recently-built home typical of the southeastern United States.