A transient model for the thermal inertia of chilled-water systems during demand response

Demand response (DR) of air-conditioning systems is important to shift or reduce the peak electricity demand of commercial buildings by shift or reduce the cooling load. Popular DR strategies of air-conditioning systems include zonal temperature reset and direct control of the main equipment. Many DR studies have been conducted on the thermal inertia of buildings for temperature resetting, but there are few studies on the thermal inertia of air-conditioning systems, which is relatively small but not negligible. In this paper, the thermal inertia of air-conditioning systems is defined as the character that causes the variation of the supply cooling capacity to zones lagging behind the variation of the cooling capacity from plants after DR strategies are implemented. This paper develops an inertia model of chilled-water systems with three sub-models, including chiller model, chilled-water pipe model and cooling coil model. The model describes the dynamic process from the cooling plant to terminal units when DR strategies on chillers are implemented. A new parameter Q(t) named the “refrigerant cooling capacity” is introduced in this study to simplify the thermal inertia model. The Q(t) patterns during the dynamic processes of two series of common chiller-side control strategies (On/Off control and resetting the chilled-water temperature) are obtained and validated using experiments and field tests. In the end, the entire transient model of air-conditioning systems is validated using experiments.