Distinguished Speaker Seminar: Improving the Control of Building HVAC Systems through Modeling

ABSTRACT: Building HVAC systems are evolving to reduce energy costs, improve energy resilience, and integrate more tightly with broader energy networks, like the electric grid and district heating and cooling systems. New equipment technology, system architectures, and control solutions are needed to meet more complex operating requirements that result from this evolution. Modeling systems and their controls facilitate research, development, testing, and evaluation of new technology with less risk and cost and more controllability than doing so in real life. Models can be embedded within controls to significantly improve real-time decision-making and operate the system to meet multiple objectives simultaneously, such as providing economic on-site energy management while maintaining service to occupants. This talk will introduce emerging challenges of HVAC controls design and implementation, discuss model-based methods and tools being developed to address these challenges, offer example applications that demonstrate the value of these new methods, and consider future directions.

BIOGRAPHY: David Blum is a computational research scientist in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  His research focuses on the application of modeling for testing and evaluating controls for building and district HVAC systems, and for implementing Model Predictive Control. Blum received his bachelor of architectural engineering degree from the Department of Architectural Engineering at Penn State in 2011 and his master of science and doctoral degrees in building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013 and 2016, respectively.  He is a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Building Performance Simulation Association. (IBPSA).