Real-time heat dissipation model of electronic equipment for determining the dynamic cooling demand of office buildings

Abstract

Internal heat gains are necessary inputs for determining the required cooling demand of Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems in office buildings. Electronic equipment is one of the main indoor thermal sources which needs to be carefully investigated because of its large heat dissipation and significant impact on the HVAC system. So far, very few studies about calculating the real-time heat dissipation of the equipment have been conducted. To address this problem, a real-time heat dissipation model of electronic equipment in office buildings is proposed in this paper. First, the structure of real-time heat dissipation model of electronic equipment was studied according to energy conservation laws, Laplace transform method, etc., and the model structure was determined as an eleventh-order transfer function. Second, an experimental setup was established to collect data on the heat dissipation and electric power consumption of typical electronic equipment, which were used for the parameter identification and model verification processes. Third, the unknown parameters in the real-time heat dissipation model were identified, and after order reduction analysis, a third-order transfer function was chosen as the heat dissipation model. Finally, experimental data and the designer's simulation toolkits were used to evaluate the proposed model's accuracy, yielding a maximum mean absolute percentage error of 9.13%. The presented model not only describes the dynamic and stochastic characteristics of the heat dissipation of electronic equipment, but also exhibits great importance in calculating instantaneous cooling demand and saving energy.