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An optimal control strategy for an integrated solar thermal hydronic system with a heat pump

University of British Columbia

In this thesis, a new control strategy is proposed for an Integrated Solar Thermal Hydronic System (ISTHS) to optimize the system performance. The ISTHS utilizes two sources of energy which are solar and electrical to provide the domestic hot water. The ISTHS performance can be optimized by reducing the consumed electricity and retaining the hot water demand temperature under disturbances such as solar radiation, ambient temperature, and how water demand flow rate. For the performance optimization, the proposed control strategy employs three techniques that are optimization, feedback control, and feedforward control. Required for designing the proposed controller, the ISTHS model is obtained by applying heat transfer and state-space modeling techniques. Using the state-space model of the ISTHS, the control structure can be designed. The control structure consists of four sub-controllers described as off-line, STC-Side, feedback, and robust feedforward controllers. By a combination of logic based switches and four sub-controllers, the final control inputs are robust against the predicted disturbances (Off-line), the actual disturbances (STC-Side and robust feedforward), and the model uncertainties (feedback). The off-line controller applies an optimization method to compute the control inputs one day ahead. The STC-Side controller performs an optimization method to manage some of the control inputs which affect the stored solar energy. The feedback controller keeps the hot water temperature within an allowable range. By using the robust feedforward controller, the consumed electricity is reduced by adjusting the control inputs which affects the amount of the transformed electricity to the thermal energy. For examining the effectiveness of the proposed robust feedforward controller, another controller named simple feedforward controller is developed and separately added to the overall controller. Both controllers are designed such that the impacts of deviated disturbances from predicted values on the system’s output are eliminated. Unlike the robust feedforward controller, the simple feedforward controller does not reduce the consumed electricity. Finally, by making some comparisons through simulations, the effectiveness of the proposed control structure is demonstrated.

Text

2020-02-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/66885

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/