An application of distributed air conditioning control network

In general the air conditioning system of a building accounts for almost 40% of the total energy consumption. The majority of the air conditioning usage occurs during the day when the building is occupied and the energy cost is higher. By shifting the portion of the peak hour usage to off-peak hours, one can potentially save up to 50% of the cost of energy for a typical office building. The paper presents a distributed building air conditioning control network that utilizes the off-peak hours to make and store ice for peak hour cooling use. One advantage of the proposed approach is that current building temperature control limits can be easily incorporated into the network, since the distributed control uses only the existing I/O information and open network communication protocol. The proposed network has the potential to include another environment control system into the existing temperature control system to form a complete building eco-control system to achieve more efficient use of available energy and to improve overall occupant comfort and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed distributed network control.