Abstract
The operation optimisation of chilled water systems, comprising chillers and pumps, should consider variations in the cooling demand. Although a number of approaches have been proposed, achieving an overall optimum in actual operation is complicated. Herein, we propose a hybrid optimisation method for a chiller-pump system in parallel-arranged systems with non-identical chillers and pumps, which are commonly applied in engineering practice but are rarely considered in the literature. A holistic optimisation based on a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm was conducted for the overall minimum energy by solving the trade-off problem between chillers and pumps. The overall energy consumption and system flow violation were simultaneously minimised by optimising practical parameters, including binary (alpha(chiller,i), alpha(pump,j)) and continuous ((Q) over dot(chiller,i), omega(j), (m) over dot(chw,j)) variables. The proposed method was evaluated via a simulation. The results suggest that the optimisation is rational, and energy saving ratios of 7.3%, 5.3%, and 34.0% for overall, chillers, and pumps, respectively, can be achieved relative to the baseline.
NSTL
Elsevier