A Microcontroller Based Efficient Scheduling System for Air Conditioner Focusing on Maximum Electricity Savings Using PWM Concept

Abstract

With the development and uses of various electrical and electronic devices, energy consumption in our daily-life is rapidly increasing. Since Air Conditioner (AC) itself is responsible for about half of the energy consumption in home and office environment, several contributions have been proposed to reduce costs. However, almost all of them require internal modification of the AC. As a result, the existing techniques hardly focus the user satisfaction during troublesome situations. To address existing limitations, in this paper, a microcontroller based smart scheduling system using Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) concept has been proposed for efficiently managing the AC operational time. The PWM concept provides complete power switching control rather than traditional sensor control without user intervention. The PWM concept has been applied to dynamically operate the AC using user-defined ‘On_time’, ‘Off_time’, and ‘Cycle_number’. Each Cycle_number is comprised of one On_time and one Off_time period that drives running and mode-switching operation of the AC automatically for the defined Cycle_number, which reduces greater energy consumption during sleep-time. Over traditional sensor control in AC, the proposed PWM based scheduling process controls power switching by automatically managing full-power “cut-off” and “activation” phases which is expedient for power saving and safety. The proposed application enables controlling the AC more dynamically than our traditional thermal sensor control by changing its mode of operation. The tested results reveal that the proposed technique can reduce 50%-75% unnecessary energy consumption by the users in-home or office environment.