3D thermal climate monitoring in factory buildings

Guaranteeing defined conditions, such as the temperature levels inside the factory's building shell, is often important to produce high-quality products. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment, as part of the technical building services, is energy intensive and accounts for a major share of the factory's energy demand. For an effective utilisation, the HVAC system control has to compensate time dependent variations of building-internal loads and demands as well as changing weather conditions that can cause local temperature differences. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamic model, coupled with a wireless sensor network, is presented that allows the estimation of the temperature and air flows at every position in the factory building, in real-time. This can then be used to improve control strategies of HVAC systems towards a more energy efficient and demand oriented climate conditioning within factory building shells.