ABSTRACT
HVAC systems are recognized as the greatest energy consumers in commercial and institutional buildings. Generally, designers use common sense, historical data, and subjective experience in designing these systems; such designs must take into account the way in which the zones served by the systems are grouped as well as the number of systems that serve each building. HVAC energy efficiency is not an easily calculable criterion to use when selecting such systems; usually, the lowest investment price becomes the primary selection criterion.This entry outlines an optimization method for HVAC systems design that uses energy consumption as the optimization criterion. The optimization variables are as follows: 1) grouping of the zones served by the systems and 2) number of systems serving the building. Constraints have been selected in order to ensure accurate representation of the variables’ limits. For this entry, we modeled an office building using the DOE-2 calculation engine.The results obtained during this HVAC optimization design process could prove to be very useful for engineers during the preliminary design phase and reveal significant savings for HVAC energy consumption. These savings are dependent upon the building’s configuration, the types of HVAC systems it has, and the control strategies these systems employ.
