Thermal Comfort Research And Energy-saving Control Optimization In Air-conditioning Terminal Of A Shopping Mall

With the continuous improvement of living quality, people have higher demand to thethermal comfort of indoor environment. With a high indoor crowd density and plenty of heatsources, the shopping mall’s indoor thermal comfort has been deeply concerned. Comfortableindoor environment is not only beneficial to people’s health, but also conducive to improvethe quality of services and increase profit to the shopping mall. As the most important meanof regulating indoor thermal environment for shopping mall, central air conditioning hascaused a tremendous amount of energy. Therefore, energy conservation of the central airconditioning system under the premise of indoor thermal comfort is the key prerequisite forshopping mall building’s energy-saving work.In this paper, combined with the characteristics of a subtropical climate, the research ofindoor thermal comfort in a large comprehensive shopping mall in Guangzhou has beenproposed. And the indoor temperature setpoint has been optimized by establishing the indoorthermal comfort model. In addition, aiming at satisfying the indoor thermal comfort, theoptimal control of air-conditioning terminal system has been studied based on theair-conditioning terminal sophisticated management control system in this shopping mall. Theresearches above provide references to the application.The studies are summarized as follows:(1) The site investigation about the indoor thermal comfort of shopping mall wasdesigned. And then, the site questionnaire survey was taken and environmental parameterswere tested which laid the foundation for the indoor thermal comfort models.(2) On the basis of analysis of the site investigation data, the MTS model and the PMVmodel for the indoor thermal have been established by using the method of regressionanalysis. As the PMV model ignores the climate adaptation of people in the subtropicalregions, its predictive value of thermal sensation is higher than the MTS model. And then, theclimate adaptive model has been established based on the MTS model.(3) On the basis of the air-conditioning terminal system of the shopping mall, the application research of the climate adaptive model has been proposed. The indoor temperaturesetpoint has been optimized. In addition, the control strategy of air-conditioning terminalsystem based on the area characteristic temperature has been proposed for the large spacestructure of shopping mall buildings. With the application of climate adaptive model and areacharacteristic temperature, the result of questionnaire survey shows that the thermalcomfortable rate of the indoor environment increased from56.1%to69.2%.(4) According the application research of climate adaptive model and area characteristictemperature above, two different control strategies have been designed for the existing airconditioning terminal control system in this shopping mall. One is that the air-conditioningterminal’s energy consumption takes precedence over chilled water pumps. The other is thatthe chilled water pumps’ energy consumption takes precedence over air-conditioning terminal.The experiment results show that the total energy consumption of air-conditioning terminaland chilled water pumps used the former strategy is6.05%lower than the latter.