A novel personalized thermal comfort control, responding to user sensation feedbacks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control architecture for office buildings, which uses the predicted mean vote (PMV) index of each occupant as feedback and offers them the opportunity to act on their own comfort level by signalling a possible thermal uncomfortable sensation to a personal user interface. A co-simulation EnergyPlus/Simulink has been used to test this new personalized and adaptive thermal comfort control in an office building for different seasons, up to two employees per office. Simulation results show that such a comfort control algorithm leads to sizeable energy savings as well as comfort improvement for each occupant. Moreover, after processing the order given by the user interface, the control algorithm makes the simulated thermal sensation match the actual thermal sensation of the occupant with a high accuracy, leading to a better consideration of his thermal comfort.