Data-Driven Smart Buildings
DDSB
With every chilled plant being unique, human optimisation is time consuming and there is a serious shortage of engineers skilled to do this work. Optimal setpoints for chilled water plants can deliver significant energy savings without equipment upgrades or new controllers, but these optimal setpoints are challenging to determine.
Exergenics’ cloud-based chilled plant optimisation software interfaced with CSIRO’s Data Clearing House (DCH) to extract and process historical chilled plant data from CSIRO’s Synergy site in Canberra, resulting in the production of optimal control setpoints for the site’s chilled plant, which were implemented to reduce the building’s energy consumption.
The Synergy site is served by 3 Air-Cooled York Screw Chillers, each with a capacity of 830kWr. The primary chilled water system is served by 3 primary chilled water pumps. The system serves 3 secondary chilled water loops and includes a thermal storage (buffer) tank.
Cloud-based Chilled Plant Optimisation Software
Historical operational chilled plant data
Large energy savings can be achieved by optimising the control strategy of chilled plants, taking account of conditions in the building, features of installed equipment, and weather. For example, some opportunities for optimisation include chiller staging, and selection of chilled water temperature setpoint, as well as load balancing between chillers. Optimisation can reduce energy consumption, reduce peak demand and improve chiller useful life by minimising run time and number of starts.
Exergenics’ optimisation engine combines the next generation of Big Data, AI & Digital Twins to ensure that every plant is operating at peak performance. Operational data is used to train advanced machine learning algorithms that build a working mathematical model of the physical plant. This model can simulate how the plant performs under a wide variety of control sequences and weather conditions.
Exergenics’ optimisation engine then loops through millions of possible scenarios that could be experienced by the plant, learning how best to control it along the way.
This project further developed and integrated Exergenics’ optimisation engine with the Data Clearing House data platform and showcased the use of the optimisation engine within CSIRO’s Synergy site. To that end, the following was achieved:
