International Journal of Computer and Applications

Buildings all around the world consume a significant amount of energy, which is more or less one-third of the total primary energy resources. This has raised concerns over energy supplies, rapid energy resource depletion, rising building service demands, improved comfort life styles along with the increased time spent in buildings; consequently, this has shown a rising energy demand in the near future. However, contemporary buildings’ energy efficiency has been fast tracked solution to cope/limit the rising energy demand of this sector. Building energy efficiency has turned out to be a multi-faceted problem, when provided with the limitation for the satisfaction of the indoor comfort index. However, the comfort level for occupants and their behavior have a significant effect on the energy consumption pattern. It is generally perceived that energy unaware activities can also add one-third to the building’s energy performance. Researchers and investigators have been working with this issue for over a decade; yet it remains a challenge. This review paper presents a comprehensive and significant research conducted on state-of-the-art intelligent control systems for energy and comfort management in smart energy buildings (SEB’s). It also aims at providing a building research community for better understanding and up-to-date knowledge for energy and comfort related trends and future directions. The main table summarizes 121 works closely related to the mentioned issue. Key areas focused on include comfort parameters, control systems, intelligent computational methods, simulation tools, occupants’ behavior and preferences, building types, supply source considerations and countries research interest in this sector. Trends for future developments and existing research in this area have been broadly studied and depicted in a graphical layout. In addition, prospective future advancements and gaps have also been discussed comprehensively.

A review on optimized control systems for building energy and comfort management of smart sustainable buildings

In the last few years, the application of Model Predictive Control (MPC) for energy management in buildings has received significant attention from the research community. MPC is becoming more and more viable because of the increase in computational power of building automation systems and the availability of a significant amount of monitored building data. MPC has found successful implementation in building thermal regulation, fully exploiting the potential of building thermal mass. Moreover, MPC has been positively applied to active energy storage systems, as well as to the optimal management of on-site renewable energy sources. MPC also opens up several opportunities for enhancing energy efficiency in the operation of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems because of its ability to consider constraints, prediction of disturbances and multiple conflicting objectives, such as indoor thermal comfort and building energy demand. Despite the application of MPC algorithms in building control has been thoroughly investigated in various works, a unified framework that fully describes and formulates the implementation is still lacking. Firstly, this work introduces a common dictionary and taxonomy that gives a common ground to all the engineering disciplines involved in building design and control. Secondly the main scope of this paper is to define the MPC formulation framework and critically discuss the outcomes of different existing MPC algorithms for building and HVAC system management. The potential benefits of the application of MPC in improving energy efficiency in buildings were highlighted.

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Model Predictive Control (MPC) for Enhancing Building and HVAC System Energy Efficiency: Problem Formulation, Applications and Opportunities

This paper investigates heat pump systems in smart grids, focussing on fields of application and control approaches that have emerged in academic literature. Based on a review of published literatu ...

https://zenodo.org/record/895978/files/article.pdf

On heat pumps in smart grids: A review

All you need to know about model predictive control for buildings

The cyclical nature and high investment costs of the wind and photovoltaic renewable energy sources are the two critical issues seeking attention for the use of such systems in backup or isolated applications. This paper aims to present the experimental and economic analysis of a wind–photovoltaic-based hybrid direct current microgrid (DCMG) system for backup power and off-grid isolated power generation system for emergency purposes. The two distributed generating units comprising photovoltaic panels and wind generator were designed and developed for the experimental study. A lead-acid battery is also added as an energy storage system to enhance the system supply. The electric load of this system comprise of 42 DC light emitting diode (LED) lamps of 12 Watt each and a 25 Watt DC fan. The charge controller provides the control and protection features for the designed system. The complete system design and fabrication of this system have been undertaken at Mehran University of Engineering & Technology (MUET, Jamshoro, Pakistan). The compatibility of the designed system has been analysed by comparing the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) with a conventional gasoline generator system of the same capacity. The capital, running and lifetime costs of DCMG are found to be 1.29, 0.15 and 0.29 times those of the gasoline generator, respectively. Moreover, it is found that per unit cost of gasoline generator is $0.3 (i.e., PKR 31.4) which is almost 3.4 times higher than that of the hybrid DCMG system. The performance and cost evaluation of the designed system indicate its broad potential to be adopted for commercialisation to meet backup power and off-grid power requirements. This study concludes that proposed DCMG system is a not only low cost, but also a pollution-free alternative option compared to the existing traditional small gasoline generator system.

Wind–PV-Based Hybrid DC Microgrid (DCMG) Development: An Experimental Investigation and Comparative Economic Analysis

The demand for electricity in remote rural areas is a major obstacle to their development. The extension of the grid network to remote rural areas has been identified as a difficult topography for complex constructions and enormous investments. The development of off-grid renewable energy generation technologies offers the opportunity for tackling these challenges. This study provides a techno-economic feasibility analysis of an off-grid hybrid renewable energy system for a rural village of district Kech, Balochistan, Pakistan. The proposed hybrid system integrates the different combinations of the wind turbine, solar PV modules, and battery backups to meet the required electric load demand. The hybrid system is modeled and optimized through a powerful simulation software Hybrid Optimized Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER-Pro). The optimized configuration of the hybrid system consists of wind turbines (12kW), solar PV (103kW), 224 lead-acid batteries (72.4Ah each), and 29.1 kW converters. The simulation results show that the proposed system can meet the power requirements of 197.74kWh/day primary demand load with 27.87kW peak load. This system configuration has the Net Present Cost (NPC) of $127,345 and Cost of Energy (COE) of 0.137$/kWh with a 100% renewable fraction. Furthermore, the results of the present study are compared with the literature and have resulted in a cost-effective hybrid renewable energy system with a low COE.

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Techno-economic Feasibility Analysis of an Off-grid Hybrid Renewable Energy System for Rural Electrification

This paper presents the performance analysis of an integrated renewable energy based power generation system with DC micro grid setup. The designed system comprises of wind generator (WG) system, photovoltaic (PV) panels, battery, charge controllers and DC loads as its major components. PV panels have the major contribution of supply hence it is the primary source for the designed system. WG acts as a secondary source because of its lower contribution in the supply. Lead acid battery is used as an energy storage system (ESS) to make the system more reliable by fulfilling the supply demand gap between the source and load. The proposed system presents a low cost, simple design integrated system based on basic electronic components with key features of stable voltages at load terminals, overvoltage and low voltage protection for load, back feed power flow protection for sources and overcharge and discharge protection for the battery backup. Real time results have been presented and proved that voltages have been maintained at the load terminals with small variation of 10–12%. This makes the system efficient and does not create much adverse effects on the load performance. The proposed system is suitable for off-grid remote areas facilities which offers reliable, cost effective and efficient system that maintains the voltage stability and improves the battery life.

Performance analysis of wind-photovoltaic-battery based DC microgrid setup for off-grid applications

Microgrids: A review on optimal hybrid technologies, configurations, and applications

This paper demonstrates the designing parameters of a solar parabolic dish prototype for rustic areas with great solar irradiance rate availability, where have no access of electricity services or low-income people survives to buy a stove (electric or gas). The solar parabolic dish prototype intends a solution against these types of remedies and pursues solar light to work. The parabolic dish has a polished surface, where the solar radiations fall and collected at a single concentrated focal point. At this point the collected form of energy is used to derive different thermal applications like as; cooking & heating with single and dual axis schemes. This paper discusses the important stages of dual axis prototype; implementation, solar location strategy, the analysis in terms of theory, structural design & material. The dual axis prototype is implemented through the help of Arduino chipboard that is easily in maintenance, along with that this prototype is configured with anti-lock H-bridge (L298) module to overcome the control circuit complexity and AVR modules. Two rotational motors of 12V are installed on 4*4ft designed aluminum frame with a dual-axis tracking system. The jerks among trackers are also reduced with this prototype which maintains the experimental declination angle about .To finish, this paper results that parabolic solar dish tracker obtains 3.43% improved power efficiency in comparison of photovoltaic panel tracker.

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Pervez Hameed Shaikh

Papers

Wind–PV-Based Hybrid DC Microgrid (DCMG) Development: An Experimental Investigation and Comparative Economic Analysis

Techno-economic Feasibility Analysis of an Off-grid Hybrid Renewable Energy System for Rural Electrification

Performance analysis of wind-photovoltaic-battery based DC microgrid setup for off-grid applications

Microgrids: A review on optimal hybrid technologies, configurations, and applications

Design of parabolic solar dish tracking system using arduino