Air handling unit

Nowadays, people spend most of their time indoors. Homes, offices, leisure and workplaces must meet people’s needs and provide safe, healthy and productive environments. The supply of fresh air plays an important role in achieving these goals. Not only by providing the right temperature and humidity but even more with the purity of the air inside the rooms. A recent study of the World Health Organization showed a significant correlation between yesterday’s particulate matters concentration in outdoor air and today’s death rate counting 7 million deaths in 2022 caused by air pollution.

Control of HVAC systems may reduce congestion of the electricity grid on district level by shifting energy demand of buildings and increase the self-consumption of local photovoltaic energy. To achieve an optimal control of ventilation, occupant behaviour should be taken into account. To describe occupant behaviour, usually black box models are used and typically need large amounts of high quality training data. Alternatively, use of physical relations allows for a good predictive power requiring less training data.

From September 2015 to March 2016, UTC engaged in a major refurbishment of its Design and Research Center located in Culoz (France).

Demand controlled ventilation (DCV) can reduce the energy use significantly compared to a constant air volume (CAV) system. However, there is still a large uncertainty about the real energy savings and the ventilation efficiency. Furthermore, control and operation of the system are more complex. To formulate answers to these questions, measurements on a DCV system in a university building in Ghent, Belgium provide insight in the system operation and performance and the air distribution in the classrooms. Monitoring is carried out in March and May 2015.