Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Civil/Mechanical/Manufacturing Engineering
Joshua Baltazar - California State University, Los Angeles
Co-Author(s): Armen Yarian, California State University Los Angeles Arturo Pacheco-Vega, California State University Los Angeles
We develop P- PD- and PID-fuzzy controllers for temperature control in a sub-scaled multi-room building. The objective is to maintain specific temperature in each of the rooms of the building while minimizing the amount of energy used to do this. The controllers are built on the fuzzy logic technique, which has the ability to describe complex systems in terms of linguistic variables, following expert based if-then rules to make inferences about their behavior.
Quantification of the linguistic variables is done via five triangular membership functions, and the rules are built from data under different operating conditions. Each room is a closed loop SISO system with a Mamdani inference method for defuzzifying of the outputs. The control variables are average temperatures inside the rooms, and the manipulated ones are flow rates of the airflow. The test-bed has 8 rooms, distributed in 2 floors. A cooling unit provides cold air to the system, whereas 25W light bulbs act as a heat load in each room. Two K-type thermocouples, placed in each room, gather temperature-readings, and dampers are designed to control the airflow delivered by the cooling unit into each.
Temperature readings and control actions are performed via LabVIEW, and MATLAB is used to implement the fuzzy controllers, while experiments are conducted to assess their relative performance. Results demonstrate that all fuzzy controllers can effectively reduce the amount of energy used for temperature control, although the PID-based control is the most efficient.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): I am a recipient of a CEaS-CSULA fellowship (NSF HRD-1547723) supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. HRD-1547723.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Arturo Pacheco-Vega, apacheco@calstatela.edu
Role: I developed and implemented an intelligent control system for the control of temperature in the multi-room test-bed. Along with this I integrated the hardware on the test-bed to control the airflow delivered into each room. I also configured the data-acquisition system and developed a serial port connection to simultaneously receive and send data between LabVIEW and MATLAB.