Public Abstract Problem: Heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) systems are prevalent especially in the US. Data shows that maintaining the air comfort of buildings consumes approximately 30% of the nation's energy. Human users and control systems are responsible for wasting as much as 30% of this energy. This research addresses both the human motivation and system aspects of HVAC app...

In this paper, we propose a predictive maintenance scheme for centralized HVAC systems by autonomous monitoring and analyzing their acoustic emissions. Our proposed solution allows a building to be retrofitted to monitor its HVAC without having to modify the existing infrastructure. Our approach is to employ an energy-efficient, low-cost, and distributed acoustic sensing platform to capture and...

Most modern HVAC systems suffer from two intrinsic problems. First, inability to meet diverse comfort requirements of the occupants. Second, heat or cool an entire zone even when the zone is only partially occupied. Both issues can be mitigated by using personal comfort systems (PCS) which bridge the comfort gap between what is provided by a central HVAC system and the personal preferences of t...

In this paper, the problem of distributed control of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system in an energy-smart building is addressed. Using tools from game theory the interaction among several autonomous HVAC units is studied and simple learning dynamics based on trial-and-error learning are proposed to achieve equilibrium. In particular, it is shown that this algorithm rea...

Control methodologies could achieve better comfort conditions of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, however, the application of classical controllers is unsatisfactory as HVAC systems are non-linear and the control variables such as temperature and relative humidity (RH) inside the thermal zone are coupled. The objective of this study is to implement and simulate adaptive...

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) is a major energy consumer in buildings, and. implementing demand driven HVAC operations is a way to reduce HVAC related energy consumption. This relies on the availability of occupancy information, which determines peak/off-hour modes that impact cooling/heating loads of HVAC systems. This research proposes an occupancy estimation model that is...

For sustainability and energy saving, the problem to optimize the control of heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has attracted great attentions, but analyzing the signatures of thermal environments and HVAC systems and the evaluation of the optimization policies has encountered inefficiency and inconvenient problems due to the lack of public dataset. In this paper, we pres...

0002-9610/$ see front matter 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amjsurg.20 Abstract BACKGROUND: Prophylactic incisional negative-pressure wound therapy use after ventral hernia repairs (VHRs) remains controversial. We assessed the impact of a modified negative-pressure wound therapy system (hybrid-VAC or HVAC) on outcomes of open VHR. METHODS: A 5-year retrospective analysis of all VHRs performed...