Optimizing Chilled Water Systems with Cooling Towers via Virtual Power Metrics and Extremum-Seeking Control
For building energy management, this work offers a practical, sensor-free solution to optimize chilled water systems, though the 15% savings are simulation-based and domain-specific.
This paper proposes an extremum seeking control method for cooling tower fans that reduces energy consumption by approximately 15% compared to conventional control, and introduces a virtual power meter achieving 96.11% correlation and 5.11% normalized error with physical meters.
This paper presents an extremum seeking control (ESC) method for cooling tower fans to minimize overall power consumption of a chilled water plant system. Simulation studies across different climate locations demonstrate energy savings of approximately 15% compared to conventional control during summer conditions. This paper also proposes a virtual power meter (VPM) to enable use of the strategy in systems that lack physical power meters. Validation tests for the VPMs against physical meters showed good accuracy with a correlation of 96.11% and a normalized error of 5.11%. Coupled with the VPM, the proposed ESC control solution can be implemented on systems using typically available sensor measurements without the need for additional instrumentation.