Abstract
District cooling (DC) continues to proliferate due to increasing global cooling demands and economies of scale benefits; however, most district-scale modeling has focused on heating, and to the best of our knowledge, researchers have yet to model cooling plants featuring waterside economizers in DC settings. With the popular Modelica Buildings library expanding its capabilities to district scale, this study is one of the first to demonstrate how the open-source models can be used for detailed energy and control analysis of a DC plant. For a real-world case study, we developed and calibrated high-fidelity models for a DC system central plant at a college campus in Colorado, USA, and we optimized the condenser water supply temperature (CWST) setpoint for a DC plant across multiple time horizons using the Optimization library in Dymola. Results indicate that annual CWST optimization saves 4.7% annual plant energy, with less than 1% of additional energy savings gained through daily optimization. This confirms previous studies' findings that high frequency CWST optimizations are not necessary for the studied system.
Original language | American English |
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Pages | 587-595 |
Number of pages | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2021 |
Event | 14th Modelica Conference 2021 - Linkoping, Sweden Duration: 20 Sep 2021 → 24 Sep 2021 |
Conference
Conference | 14th Modelica Conference 2021 |
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City | Linkoping, Sweden |
Period | 20/09/21 → 24/09/21 |
NREL Publication Number
- NREL/CP-5500-81665
Keywords
- chiller plant
- district cooling
- Modelica Buildings library
- optimization
- waterside economizer