Thermal-environment characteristics and comfort of combined radiant-floor (Korean heating system ondol) and convective cooling system

The thermal-environment characteristics of the existing forced-convection cooling system were compared with those of the convective cooling system, which combined the radiant-floor cooling system using floor-heating panel typically applied to apartments in South Korea with the forced-convection cooling system using improved fan coil unit. The subjective warm/cool-feeling responses to the combined radiant-floor and convective cooling system in the questionnaire survey conducted among the test subjects were analyzed to establish the basic data for the combined cooling system. The results show that in the thermal-equilibrium condition, the vertical air temperature difference in the model living room is larger in the forced-convection-cooling condition. Most of the subjects feel a proper warm/cool feeling on their entire body, but they feel colder on the foot and lower body in the combined-cooling condition.

Thermodynamic performance assessment of vacuum membrane-based dehumidification and air carrying energy radiant air-conditioning system(VMD-ACERS)

Temperature and humidity independent control(THIC)air-conditioning system is a promising technology.In this work,a novel temperature and humidity independent control(THIC)system is proposed,namely VMD-ACERS,which integrates vacuum membrane-based dehumidification and air carrying energy radiant air-conditioning system.This work establishes a novel coefficient of performance(COP)model of VMD-ACERS.The main parameters affecting the COP of conventional fan coil unit cooling system(FCUCS)and VMD-ACERS are investigated.The performance of FCUCS and VMD-ACERS are compared,and the energy-saving potential of VMD-ACERS is proved.Results indicate that,for FCUCS,the importance ranking of parameters is basically stable.However,for VMD-ACERS,the importance ranking will be affected by FCU and refrigerant.The most important parameters of VMD-ACERS are condensation temperature and permeate side pressure.On the contrary,superheating,subcooling are relatively less important parameters.For VMD-ACERS,it is not necessary to pursue the membrane with very high selectivity,because the selectivity of membrane would also be a less important parameter when it reaches 500.The COP of VMD-ACERS is higher than that of FCUCS when the permeate side pressure is higher than 8 k Pa.The VMD-ACERS solves two technical problems about power-saving and thermal comfort of conventional THIC,and can extend the application of THIC air-conditioning system.

Auto-Tuning Parameters of Fractional PID Controller Design for Air-Conditioning Fan Coil Unit

The traditional integer order PID controller manipulates the air-conditioning fan coil unit(FCU)that offers cooliug and heatins loads to each air-conditioning room in summer and winter,respectivelv.In order to maintain a steady indoor temperature in summer and winter,the control quality cannot meet the related requirements of air-conditioning automation,such as large overshoot,large steady state error.long regulating time,etc.In view of these factors,this paper develops a fractional order PID controller to deal with such problem associated with FCU.Then,by varving mutation factor and crossover rate of basic differential evolution algorithmadaptivelv,a modified differential evolution algorithm(MDEA)is designed to tune the satisfactory values of five parameters of indoor temperature fractional order PID controller.This fractional order PID coutrol system is configured and the corresponding mumerical simulation is conducted by means of MATLAB software.The results indicate that the proposed fractional order PID control svstem and MDEA are reliable and the related control performance indexes meet with the related requirements of comfortable air-conditioning design and control criteria.