CAEE Seminar - Optimization-based Intelligent Operation of Building-to-grid Integration with Renewables
Prof. Paul Anderson, Prof. Jamshid Mohammadi , and Prof. Brent Stephens of the Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring Fuxin Niu, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA). Candidate for Architectural Engineering Faculty Position in the Department of CAEE at IIT. The topic of the seminar will be Optimization-based Intelligent Operation of Building-to-grid Integration with Renewables.
Abstract
In the United States, 40% of the nation’s total energy consumption and 75% of the total electricity consumption consumed by commercial and residential buildings, and those numbers are projected to be 46% and 80% by year 2035. Primary energy source is limited, and quickly consumed in the modern world. A sustainable energy future and net zero energy buildings require high penetration of Renewable Energy Source (RES) such as wind and solar. However, the constrained availability and variability/intermittency of RES present a great challenge to integrate wind and solar energy into the power grid at a large scale. There is a huge potential for building energy cost savings through a proactive integration with the power grid. The key to improve building operation efficiency is to coordinate and optimize the operation of various energy sources with time-sensitive electricity price. In addition, Energy storage systems (e.g., electric battery, thermal storage from chilled water storage tank and building envelope thermal mass, etc.) increase the complexity of the whole system integration.
The intelligent building operation scheduling problem is formulated with the power grid, solar PV panels, electrical batteries as alternative energy sources, water tank and building envelope as thermal energy storage. The optimization is solved as a mixed integer programming problem. A platform of AMPL (A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming) is used to for mathematical modeling and links to the optimization solvers. A case study shows that energy storage technologies provide an effective way to connect various energy supply resources and demands, and facilitate efficient and intelligent building operations.
Speaker Bio
Fuxin Niu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA). Prior to starting at UA, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for two years. He received his B.S. from the Dalian University of Technology, China, his M.S. and Ph.D. in Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) engineering from the Harbin institute of Technology in China. His research interests include building-to-grid integration, building energy system modeling and simulation, HVAC system design and controls, renewable energy, uncertainty quantification, and large-scale optimization. He has published 17 journal papers and 12 conference papers until now. He is the recipient of the competitive ASHRAE grant-in-aid grant and the prestigious 2016 UA graduation council fellowship.