Dynamic indoor thermal comfort model identification based on neural computing PMV index

Abstract

This paper focuses on modelling and simulation of building dynamic thermal comfort control for non-linear HVAC system. Thermal comfort in general refers to temperature and also humidity. However in reality, temperature or humidity is just one of the factors affecting the thermal comfort but not the main measures. Besides, as HVAC control system has the characteristic of time delay, large inertia, and highly nonlinear behaviour, it is difficult to determine the thermal comfort sensation accurately if we use traditional Fanger's PMV index. Hence, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been introduced due to its ability to approximate any nonlinear mapping. Using ANN to train, we can get the input-output mapping of HVAC control system or in other word; we can propose a practical approach to identify thermal comfort of a building. Simulations were carried out to validate and verify the proposed method. Results show that the proposed ANN method can track down the desired thermal sensation for a specified condition space. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.