Facility Energy Management based on adaptive thermal comfort protocols: A case-study

Facility energy management is an increasing problem in developing countries, given the mismatch between the rising demand due to the increasing number of IT firms and supply-end limitations. A principled approach for energy consumption in these facilities is now necessary, so as to establish a supply-demand coherence. Such an approach should ideally be based on the principles of psychrometry governing the category of spaces, and protocols to achieve this end should further be incorporated into the Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) so as to be able to judiciously manage energy supply across facilities.In this paper, we present a real-time intelligent sensing and monitoring system, which decides the thermal comfort for a space based on the psychrometric influences of the location and their interaction with the space of interest. The system decides the thermal comfort in real-time, and establishes the same by using a sub-set of resources from the available set. The proposed system will establish thermal comfort for the diverse space categories commonly found in facilities and further, is also scalable. We conjecture that the proposed system will make the optimal use of the available resources thereby aiding judicious management of energy per space. Further, such a principled approach helps to cater to the thermal comfort demands of futurisitic spaces. We demonstrate the working principle with a case study of a mixed-mode space.