Fault-adaptive control of VAV damper stuck in a multizone building

This paper presents a potential effective approach to fault adaptive control for damper stucks in variable-air-volume (VAV) boxes in building heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. The fault-adaptive controller integrates a dedicated bank of unknown input residual generators for fault detection/isolation followed by suitably designed fault estimators and a model predictive controller. The adaptation of the controller to the fault is achieved by online modification of the constraints in the model predictive control to achieve reduced energy consumption and thermal comfort under faulty modes. The proposed fault-adaptive control law is demonstrated on a four-zones building benchmark.