Model-Assisted Commissioning of a Chilling Plant

Abstract

The chilling plant of a large commercial building located in Brussels is currently submitted to repetitive commissioning. The measurements are automatically taken by the Building Energy Management System. This system has been previously commissioned and can be considered as rather reliable. A model is from long time available for simulating the whole plant. BEMS measurements available can easily be used to determine the main energy transfers inside this system, from the building towards the chillers and, finally, the cooling towers. An almost continuous parameter identification of the chilling plant model has been done, during several years. Several examples are presented in the paper, demonstrating, ab absurdo, how much a “model-assisted” continuous commissioning can help in deciding when a preventive maintenance should be done.