Modelling and mitigating lifetime impact of building demand responsive control of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems

This paper presents a modelling methodology to characterize heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment lifetime impact of load controls and an aging-aware demand responsive control strategy for single-stage HVAC systems to strike a balance between the electric utility and HVAC life-cycle costs. To assess the control performance and evaluate potential trade-offs between energy consumption, utility cost and equipment lifetime impact, whole-month simulation tests for a single-zone office building have been conducted for the proposed aging-aware control strategy along with two benchmarking strategies – energy minimizing and utility cost minimizing controllers. Test results show that the aging-aware demand response strategy could result in reductions of HVAC equipment aging effect by 18.8% to 39.1% compared to the utility-priority controller. The total building operation cost, with the electricity utility and HVAC life-cycle costs combined, could be reduced by up to 13.2% compared to the utility minimizing strategy and by up to 16.1% compared to the energy minimization baseline.