Personalized building comfort control

Creating an appropriate indoor climate is essential to worker productivity and personal happiness. It is also an area of large expenditure for building owners. And, with rising fuel costs, finding ways of reducing energy consumption is more important than ever. This idea is promoted further by the notion that most buildings are currently being run inefficiently, due to the non-adaptable nature of their control systems. Not just the occupants, but also the buildings themselves have ever changing needs, for which a single setpoint is inadequate. This dissertation presents a novel air-conditioning control system, focused around the individual, which remedies these inefficiencies through the creation of personalized environments. To date, the measurement of thermal preference has been limited to either a complex set of sensors attempting to determine a Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) value, or to direct polling of the user. The former is far too cumbersome and expensive for practical application, and the latter places an undue burden on the user. To overcome these limitations, an extremely low power, light weight, wireless sensor is developed which can measure temperature, humidity, activity and light level directly on the user's body. These data are used to immediately infer user comfort level, and to control an HVAC system in an attempt to minimize both cost and thermal discomfort. Experimental results are presented from a building under continual usage, modified with a wireless network with multiple sensing and actuating modalities.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Feldmeier, Mark Christopher, 1974-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joseph A. Paradiso.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55185

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55185