Simulation of a centralized cooling plant under different control strategies

The simulated cooling plant equips an office building whose maximum cooling demand is about 5 MW. To meet this load, the cooling plant uses five cooling towers, four twin-screw chillers and four encapsulated ice storage tanks. The simulation of the cooling plant is carried out with the software TRNSYS. To perform the simulation, the system components are first modeled and identified on the basis of the information given by the equipment manufacturers and the installers. Once the parameter identification of the components is done, TRNSYS is used to simulate the cooling plant in each operating mode. This paper focuses on two operating modes : the pure discharging and the direct production with possible discharging. For these modes, a control strategy was developed during the cooling plant design phase. This paper discusses the impact on the plant performance of changes brought to the designed control strategies.