A research team from University of Wisconsin has partnered with Johnson Controls, a global energy company headquartered in Milwaukee, to develop more efficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems for large commercial buildings.
The team is headed by Jim Rawlings, professor of chemical and biological engineering, and includes Christos Maravelias, professor of chemical and biological engineering, in addition to Ph.D. students Michael Risbeck and Nishith Patel.
The new HVAC technology system, model predictive control, is intended for use in large buildings, Rawlings said. Improved energy efficiency will lead to more savings and presumably more customers, he said.
Large commercial buildings could reduce energy costs, even if they are using the same amount of electricity, by shifting loads from peak hours to off-peak hours, Maravelias said.
“The major advantage is that it’s predictive,” Maravelias said. “It optimizes, in a way, what we have to do today taking into account what is going to happen in the future.”
The simplest advantage to the technology is that it would offer cooling during the night or early morning when electricity prices are lower, instead of trying to cool during the middle of the day when prices are very high, Maravelias said.
Calculating and conserving energy costs is something managers of large facilities have on their minds, Rawlings said.
The future systems will replace more venerable, less efficient HVAC systems that use technology that is often decades old, Rawlings said.
Other academic institutions have proposed these types of methods, but when it comes to actually creating and implementing the system, this is the first time it has been tried, Maravelias said.
“Right now there is a huge amount of energy being consumed in HVAC systems, so even small improvements, even small savings in energy and cost, make a big difference,” Maravelias said. “I would say this collaboration is huge.”
The collaborative engineering project uses algorithms to calculate more efficient HVAC systems for large buildings to conserve energy, Maravelias said.
As new HVAC technology continues to develop, Johnson Controls looks to capitalize on the demand for updated systems for large-scale commercial building sites including airports, universities and larger warehouses, Rawlings said.
“[HVAC systems are] not nearly as efficient as they could be,” Rawlings said. “In their time they were state of the art but we can do a lot more energy optimization than we used to be able to do.”
HVAC system could save between 10 to 20 percent on energy if they installed the latest kind of technologies, Rawlings said.
Johnson Controls is going to use the technology being developed, Maravelias said.
“Johnson Controls wants to employ the future technology that will lead to energy savings,” Maravelias said. “In order to develop that technology, some fundamental research questions have to be addressed so they [partnered] with us to do this fundamental research.”
After working on the research project for over a year, Rawlings believes his team is close to having prototype methods that work on simulation examples and predicts that in another year or two, Johnson Controls will make the technology commercially available.
