Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The future design of high performance buildings is expected to involve more active facade technologies to produce comfortable indoor environments with reduced energy consumption. An important performance in dynamic building facade control is to ensure indoor environmental quality based on important factors such as thermal, acoustic, and visual comfort and air quality. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is considered to be one of the most suited method to achieve optimal environmental control. This paper presents the development and validation of an integrated shading and natural ventilation model suitable for application within MPC with indoor environmental quality as its optimization objective. Firstly, the indoor environmental quality model with dynamic environmental factor weights is used as the objective function. Then, physical knowledge is used to establish a set of differential equations that can respond to indoor and outdoor environment through shading and natural ventilation. A model of the relationship between the indoor environmental quality and window opening size and shading angle is established. Finally, an algorithm based on MPC was developed in order to achieve indoor environmental quality and the comprehensive optimization environmental control method for intelligent facade was obtained. In the application experiments of the actual building, MPC controls the building reliably and achieves a good comfort level. The facade control model can be applied to the building automation control system, as one of the control modules, to improve the room comfort and reduce energy consumption.