Experimental study of a bilinear control for a GSHP integrated air-conditioning system

This paper presents an experimental study on a bilinear temperature control of a ground source heat pump (GSHP) integrated variable air volume (VAV) air-conditioning system, which may experience significant variations in the supply air temperature due to the frequent on/off switch of the ground source heat pump and the low thermal capacity at the air side. The bilinear control was realized in a building automation system (BAS) and applied to a test rig. The experimental results show that with an online estimation of the cooling load the bilinear control was able to maintain the space temperature at its set-point well and the control performance was superior to that of a conventional PI control. Therefore, the bilinear control has the potential to be used in GSHP integrated air-conditioning systems to improve the robustness and accuracy of the space temperature control.