Hybrid Predictive Control of a Solar Air Conditioning Plant

This paper presents a hybrid controller for a solar air conditioning plant, located at the University of Seville, Spain, and used as a benchmark for the HYCON NoE of the EU. The plant uses two sources of energy: solar and gas, plus a set of accumulation tanks and an absorption tower to provide conditioned air to an university building. The hybrid control is based on a model predictive control strategy developed with the objective of operating the air conditioning system using the smaller amount of energy from gas. A novel approach incorporating an internal model with embedded logic control is used to transform the hybrid problem in a continuous-nonlinear one. Simulation results are presented, showing promising results.