Building Temperature Control

This document describes the procedure to interface the building temperature control experiment to the DS1104 dSPACE data acquisition card. It also provides one simple example of distributed control system that could be implemented. 1 The Model building The building temperature control experiment is a two floor model building with temperature sensors and heaters in each room that simulates diverse and realistic temperature control challenges encountered in multizone temperature control for buildings. The difficulty in modeling this system comes from the multitude of unique variations and the addition of different disturbances. What happens if we open a window? What if there is air blowing in or out? Figure 1 shows a layout of the two building levels in its basic configuration. All doors and windows can be opened or closed and there are 4 electronically controllable fans that can be used for disturbances (e.g. by putting the fans in the windows) or to simulate a heating system that uses forced air. The two floors can be segmented and studied in isolation or put together to consider interaction effects. In addition, the walls dividing rooms 3 and 4, and 5 and 6, can be pulled out to study temperature control for different floor layouts (or, you could change the material used for the wall which would result in different interaction effects). 2 Connecting the Experiment In order to interface the experiment with dSPACE a general purpose Quanser DS1104 interface board is used. This board provides the interface between the internal dSPACE DS1104 data acquisition card and several connectors. This section describes how the plant inputs and outputs are connected to the Quanser ∗Under the direction of K. Passino, this experiment was originally constructed by a group of undergraduates in an EE682P design project and it was later significantly improved by Todd Broceus and Tyson Rathburn. Jorge Finke added electrically controllable fans, interface cables, and implemented a controller in dSpace.