ENHANCING ENERGY REDUCTION IN BUILDING MULTI-CIRCUIT AIR CONDITIONING SYSTEMS USING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE DIGITAL CONTROLLER

With buildings accounting for a significant share of global energy use, Energy management in buildings plays a critical role in reducing energy consumption, minimizing operational costs, and promoting environmental sustainability. Air conditioning system has the highest energy consumption in buildings, thus it is a necessity to reduce the rate at which energy is being consumed in Air conditioning. Energy management research in air conditioning systems is numerous, but very few studies were carried out involving an operational centralized multi-circuit air conditioning system. This paper presents a study on the application of digital on/off control system on an installed and operational multi-circuit centralized air cooled air-conditioning system. The digital on/off control implementation was compared with the on/off control's baseline energy usage. The results obtained showed that the digital controller was able to save 12.6%, 18.9% and 21.8% of energy consumption at temperature setpoints of 23oC, 24oC, 25oC respectively. In this study an operational multi-circuit centralized air conditioning system's performance has improved and energy consumption has decreased as a result of the digital control approach developed by this study