Performance Analysis of Modified Elliot Function Based Temperature Controller in the Heating Mode Operation of AHU

Buildings, and their Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are responsible for the majority of total global energy consumption and this fact has been increasing emphasis on innovative and efficient energy saving concepts for several years. With the dynamic nature of the indoor thermal conditions, optimum controlling of the operation of heat exchanger coils in Air Handling Units (AHU) is particularly required to ensure user comfort and energy efficiency. This can be accomplished by precisely adjusting the valve opening of the primary supply to heat exchangers. PID controllers are being commonly used as the conventional control method while many other control strategies are offering better performance and hence allowing significant energy saving. This paper introduces a novel modified Elliot function based controller which can be applied for regulating supply air temperature by adjusting the valve opening of the heat exchanger coil in AHU and analyses the performance for heating mode operation by comparing with PID, Fuzzy Logic, and Sigmoid function-based controllers. The results illustrate that the proposed controller outperforms conventional PID controllers and offers closer performance to Fuzzy Logic controllers with 20876 times reduced execution time.