An extremum seeking algorithm for determining the set point temperature for condensed water in a cooling tower

Energy consumed by buildings accounts for approximately 20 % of the total energy consumption in the United States of America (USA). A significant number of commercial buildings in the USA are cooled using a bank of chillers which reject the thermal loads on the buildings to the atmosphere through cooling towers. About two-thirds of the total power consumption in such buildings is due to the power consumption of the compressors in the chillers and the fans in the cooling tower. The total steady state power consumed by the compressors and the fans seems to be a convex function of the chilled water temperature of the cooling tower at most operating thermal loads. In this paper, we propose an extremum seeking algorithm for determining the set point temperature for the tower given the load on a building