Francesco Simmini’s research while affiliated with University of Padua and other places

Several faults affect heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) chiller systems, leading to energy wastage, discomfort for the users, shorter equipment life, and system unreliability. Early detection of anomalies can prevent further deterioration of the chiller and energy wastage. In this work, a data-driven approach is used in order to detect faults that usually plague chiller systems. In particular, the proposed approach employs a kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) in order to capture the normal operative conditions of the system; the learning method turns out to be effective in handling nonlinear phenomena through the use of the Gaussian kernel, which, by means of a self-tuning procedure, ensures good accuracy properties while maintaining enough generalization characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed fault detection method is evaluated by means of tests on emulated and real chiller data. The KPCA approach is first proved to exhibit better detection performances than linear PCA, and then, it is corroborated through the comparison with local outlier factor, one-class support vector machine, and isolation forest.

Efficient management of energy resources is crucial in smart buildings. In this work, model predictive control (MPC) is used to minimize the economic costs of prosumers equipped with production units, energy storage systems, and electric vehicles. To this purpose, the predictive control manages the available energy resources by exploiting future information about energy prices, absorption and production power profiles, and electric vehicle (EV) usage, such as times of departure and arrival and predicted energy consumption. The predictive control is compared with a rule-based technique, herein referred to as a heuristic approach, that acts in an instant-by-instant fashion without considering any future information. The reported results show that the studied predictive approach allows one to achieve charging profiles that adapt to variable operating conditions, aiming at optimal performances in terms of economic cost minimization in time-varying price scenarios, reduction of rms current stresses, and recharging capability of EV batteries. Specifically, unlike the heuristic method, the MPC approach is proven to be capable of efficiently managing the available energy resources to ensure a full recharge of the EV battery during nighttime while always respecting all system constraints. In addition, the proposed control is shown to be capable of keeping the peak power absorption from the grid constrained within set limits, which is a valuable feature in scenarios with widespread adoption of EVs in order to limit the stress on the electrical system.

The diffusion of distributed energy resources in distribution networks requires new approaches to exploit the users’ capabilities of providing ancillary services. Of particular interest will be the coordination of microgrids operating as an aggregate of demand and supply units. This work reports a model predictive control (MPC) application in microgrids for the efficient energy management of energy storage systems and photovoltaic units. The MPC minimizes the economic cost of aggregate prosumers into a prediction horizon by forecasting generation and absorption profiles. The MPC is compared in realistic conditions with a heuristic strategy that acts in a instant manner, without taking into account signals prediction. The work aims at investigating the effect that different types of energy tariffs have in enhancing the end-users’ flexibility, based on three examples of currently applied tariffs, comparing the two storage control modes. The MPC always achieves a better solution than the heuristic approach in all considered scenarios from the cost minimization point of view, with an improvement that is amplified by increasing the energy price variations between peak and off-peak periods. Furthermore, the MPC approach provides a cost saving when compared to the case considering a microgrid endowed with only photovoltaic units, in which no storage is installed. Findings in this work confirm that storage units better perform when some knowledge of future demand and supply trends is provided, ensuring an economic cost saving and an important service for the overall community.

This work presents the application of model predic-tive control (MPC) for the energy management of smart buildings in microgrids. It is shown that by means of the described MPC formulation the power exchange at the point of connection of the building can be made close to a given power reference, typically available in microgrid contexts, and, therefore, more predictable. The MPC has the advantage of using in a smart way the storage, with a limited stress to the electronic power interface of the storage system. In principle, the approach is capable of exploiting all the available information about generation and absorption profiles, while minimizing operation costs. In addition, an economic meaning of the terms of the cost function is given, which allows to better appreciate the economic impact of the set control parameters. The approach is evaluated considering realistic conditions and parameters and compared with a heuristic method that operates in an instantaneous basis, that is, without considering any information on future system evolution.

Faulty operations of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) chiller systems can lead to discomfort for the users, energy wastage, system unreliability and shorter equipment life. Faults need to be early diagnosed to prevent further deterioration of the system behaviour and energy losses. In this paper a model-based approach is used in order to detect important chiller systems faults. First, a linear dynamic black-box model is identified for each of the relevant characteristic features of the system during the normal functioning of the chiller. Then, an on-line correlogram method verifies the whiteness property of the residuals in order to distinguish anomalies from normal operations. A decision table, that matches the influence of anomalies with the characteristic features, allows to identify chiller faults. The proposed fault detection and diagnosis approach is assessed by using real chiller data provided by the ASHRAE research project RP-1043.

Faulty operations of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) chiller systems can lead to discomfort for the users, energy wastage, system unreliability and shorter equipment life. Faults need to be early diagnosed to prevent further deterioration of the system behaviour and energy losses. Since it is not a common practice to collect historical data regarding unforeseen phenomena and abnormal behaviours for HVAC installations, in this paper, a semi-supervised data-driven approach is employed for fault detection and isolation that makes no use of a priori knowledge about abnormal phenomena. The proposed method exploits Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to distinguish anomalies from normal operation variability and a reconstruction-based contribution approach to isolate variables related to faults. The diagnosis task is then tackled by means of a decision table that associates the influence of faults to certain characteristic features. The Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) algorithm performance is assessed by exploiting experimental datasets from two types of water chiller systems.

In heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems of medium/high cooling capacity, energy demands can be matched with the help of thermal energy storage (TES) systems. If properly designed, TES systems can reduce energy costs and consumption, equipment size and pollutant emissions. In order to design efficient control strategies for TES systems, we present a model-based approach with the aim of increasing the performance of HVAC systems with ice cold thermal energy storage (CTES). A simulation environment based on Matlab/Simulink® is developed, where thermal behaviour of the plant is analysed by a lumped formulation of the conservation equations. In particular, the ice CTES is modelled as a hybrid system, where the water phase transitions (solid–melting–liquid and liquid–freezing–solid) are described by combining continuous and discrete dynamics, thus considering both latent and sensible heat. Standard control strategies are compared with a non-linear model predictive control (NLMPC) approach. In the simulation examples model predictive control proves to be the best control solution for the efficient management of ice CTES systems.

Faulty operations of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) chiller systems can lead to discomfort for the occupants, energy wastage, unreliability and shorter equipment life. Such faults need to be detected early to prevent further escalation and energy losses. Commonly, data regarding unforeseen phenomena and abnormalities are rare or are not available at the moment for HVAC installations: for this reason in this paper an unsupervised One-Class SVM classifier employed as a novelty detection system to identify unknown status and possible faults is presented. The approach, that exploits Principal Component Analysis to accent novelties w.r.t. normal operations variability, has been tested on a HVAC literature dataset.