Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Sensors and Controls for HVAC Systems

Group Members: Shuyuan Zhang & Shaden Dahroug


The following project was selected to research based on the interest and knowledge of the importance of HVAC systems within a building since it’s one of the main contributing factors of energy consumption within a building, whether during the summer or winter season or even spring since an HVAC system is required all year around to maintain the building’s condition to achieve comfort of occupants within a building, while maintaining indoor air quality. As sensors may be used to increase energy efficiency, it’s also important for maintenance of the required indoor condition as non-efficient sensors may lead a building to overheat or overcool, leading occupants of the building to feel uncomfortable and that may impact their productivity within a work environment.
Sensors and controls for HVAC systems is believed to be an important aspect of an intelligent buildings, because of its technological features that doesn’t require manual control from humans in order to maintain its requirements, where it’s control is achieved through sensors that only require implementing the program of the sensors with the building requirements to do its job of maintaining the buildings indoor air condition for occupant’s comfort.
The research will be focused on how sensors collect data for an HVAC system, and how the equipment or system process the data to control the indoor air conditions. In addition to exploring the advantage and disadvantage of each sensor to determine which would be the most relevant for an intelligent building to achieve maximum comfort of occupants and energy efficiency. In addition to determining what effects the performance of a given sensor.
The following sensors listed below are the sensor that will be researched for this project, while other parameters that will be put into consideration for the following project will be trying to understand the initial and maintenance cost of the following sensors as those are influential factors for an owner when selecting most component within a building.
o   Carbon-dioxide emission sensor
o   Occupancy sensor (movement)
o   Radiation sensor (heat)
o   Traditional temperature / humidity sensor
A model will also be created for research purposes to determine the relevance of our findings for the research, and that will be achieved through using eQuest for energy analysis to have a closer look at which sensor may truly be more energy efficient compared to the other sensors selected for research.  
The process of determining the relevance of our findings for the project will be a challenge as eQuest may not be enough for this evaluation, and that may lead to requiring database expertise in order to create a database to determine the relevance of the findings of the project.

Comments:
Dung Tran,
A life on mars sounds interesting, and your project is very interesting but it leads me thinking how many spaceships and trips will this require for building one place “let’s say a house” and what are the environmental impacts of those spaceship as they leave earth and go into space, and since automated construction will definitely increase the traffic in space, I wonder if that will have an impact on the environment in space. I would also like to comment about your problem statement it shows that you have thoroughly thought the challenges that may come with your project.
Best of Luck on your project.


Malik Anibab,
I find the scope of your project interesting because it questions whether a building can be green and intelligent or just intelligent or just green. Probably increasing a building’s intelligence may be increasing a building’s energy consumption in some sort of way, but there is probably methods of using plants for energy production, where a building feeds energy of itself.
The following links below are articles about the BIQ building which is located in Hamburg, Germany. The building is interesting because it has double skin to make the building green, where the second skin is made out of a bioreactor. Thought of sharing since this may be helpful with your research.
Best of Luck on your project.

 

Term Project Description

Zac Arnold,
It’s intelligent of you and Mark to take advantage of the project and choose Revit as a project to increase your familiarity with its use and try to determine its flaws through experimenting it yourselves which is an important thing to do, because you only get better by practicing using the software more and more. In addition, how you considered the scope of construction business as whole when it comes to general contractors, subcontractors, owners, etc.  
Best of Luck on your project.

1 comment:

  1. I would love to have a HVAC system with sensors and controls for my house. This winter I got a ridiculously high gas bill because of heating. I had to manually raise the temperature at night and kept forgetting to lower it in the morning, as the result the whole building was kept heating all day. I wonder if it would be possible to integrate such sensors and controls to an existing HVAC system, also will the cost of installing such system worth the cost of electricity or gas that it can save.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.