Climate Control Analytics Promote Sustainability

By Martha Bushong, Director of Communications

Tere’s a saying in Virginia, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes—it will change.” Temperature fuctuations can cause climate control systems to work overtime, and we don’t always understand the efect on budgets until it’s time to pay the bill. But what if there was a system that monitored your heating and cooling system and provided information to help conserve energy and save money?

In spring 2016 Adam O’Connor and his team decided to create such a system for their senior design project. Tey call it Climate Control Analytics (CCA).

“At its heart, CCA is a data acquisition system,” said O’Connor. “We are developing a sensor network to capture key data points in the HVAC system, its building, and the surrounding environment.”

It works like this: Te sensor network feeds data to a central database system—the Sensor Output Database (SOD). Te SOD functions as the central data hub, or the fle cabinet of the software system’s separate entities—a web dashboard user interface, a central control that coordinates all system processes, and the active control system.

If the SOD is the fle cabinet, the web dashboard is the assistant that helps users generate HVAC system performance and consumption reports. Te team designed the CCA to collect and store data for 10 years—the expected lifespan of HVAC equipment.

Te active control system allows users to see how much it will cost to set the thermostat for any particular temperature set point. It does this by modeling the indoor temperature with a system of diferential equations and using a sliding window multi-linear regression outdoor temperature model to predict daily outdoor temperature curves.

By using historical outdoor temperature data and HVAC system performance data, the CCA system will enable consumers to know how much it will cost to keep their home or business at a particular temperature, even in Virginia where it can be winter in the morning, and summer by lunchtime.

The project was awarded a Patriot Green Fund student research grant through the Offce of Sustainability.