SIMUBEMS: An educational tool on control techniques

This paper describes an educational tool developed at LASH ENTPE (France) laboratory. Theobjective of this tool, called SIMUBEMS, is to familiarize ENTPE students with control techniques andallows performing simulations in order to test heating and ventilation control strategies.An office building equipped with an HVAC system has been used to carry out the simulations. Themodelled zone is 9 m long, 6 m large and 2.5 m height and has large glazed faade. SIMUBEMS hasbeen developed under LABVIEW environment and is based on an explicit finite differences method.Several control strategies for heating (On-Off and PID) based on temperature have been implementedto the model.The objective of the simulations conducted by students is to identify optimal parameters for eachcontroller in order to reach a good thermal comfort at the least energy cost. The simulations aim alsoat highlighting the key role of advanced control techniques to manage heating systems.