Personalized Thermal Comfort Driven Control Techniques in HVAC Systems

The Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control systems traditionally use thermostats, expending energy freely to achieve a given set point. Intelligent controllers which use programmable thermostats are smarter and allow users to vary set points by time of the day and day of the week. Nevertheless, none of these control systems are aware of user comfort: they focus, instead, only on controlling room temperature. Participation of the buildings’ occupants is essential in learning their comfort pro-files as personalized thermal comfort driven HVAC operations do. Studies conducted in the last decade showed that while intelligent HVAC control systems can greatly improve thermal comfort, energy consumption reduction, health, satisfaction and productivity. Personalized thermal comfort driven control is the most effective way of both saving energy and maintaining thermal comfort. This paper provides a detailed review of HVAC control techniques from traditional controllers towards personalized thermal comfort driven controllers. Meanwhile, the paper appraises recent advanced techniques on the design and control of personalized HVAC systems. As an application and case study, a personalized thermal comfort driven controller which is being developed in Izmir Institute of Technology will be introduced and the preliminary results will be discussed.