Abstract:
This work demonstrates how a water and energy sustainable building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system may be operated to maximize condensate production while upholding user thermal comfort and energy consumption requirements. A physics-based HVAC condensate model was presented and validated against operating data from the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design (KBISD), a 3,437.4-m2 (37,000-ft2) academic building on the Georgia Institute of Technology's Atlanta campus. A sensitivity study of the HVAC condensate production and power consumption was performed. Metamodels were developed to concisely yet accurately represent the physics-based model, and these were used as the basis of an optimization exercise to identify competitive operating conditions for maximizing condensate production. The case studies included here found optimized HVAC system operation strategies to produce up to 708% more condensate. The demonstrated approach may be reproduced by system operators or building automation systems to increase condensate production without sacrificing building system-level energy and thermal comfort requirements. Β© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
