A wireless sensor network approach for the control of a multizone HVAC system

Abstract

Energy consumption has become a very important case due to the global energy issue. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for efficient energy control in Heat Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) Systems. An effective method for controlling the heat energy in a multiple room building is the multizone approach, where each room is treated as a single zone and temperature control is applied separately for each zone. In the proposed technique, the multizone approach is adopted along with a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) of temperature nodes, where each node covers a single zone and communicates its sensed values to adjacent nodes. Each node is responsible for the tuning of a heating source so that a preset zone temperature value is maintained. Moreover, each node utilizes a simple lumped capacity model for its controlling zone and based on the received neighbor temperature values detects possible divergences from the anticipated energy consumption. Simulation results using a simple weather temperature model and Proportional Integral (PI) controllers verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.