Vision-Based Occupant Tracking Application For Smart Glass Window Façade Embedded with Thermal Imaging Sensor to control HVAC ventilation

Authors

  • Mohamed Ahmed Said Mohammed

Abstract

Today, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Condition (HVAC) equipment account for an average of 60% of total traditional building energy consumption. A high percentage of this consumption was avoidable through efficient control to avoid ventilation of vacant space as well as operating automatic and continues adjusting ventilation rate proportional to the number of occupancies equipment presently in space. Recent research focuses on implementing various strategies to leverage the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) by transforming traditional home to smart home, which can monitor meteorological data and occupied areas by turning HVAC equipment ON at a specified ventilation rate. These researches have attained an overall average of 45% accuracy and 30% energy saving potential. The existing strategies suffer from false human occupancy detection and estimation in order to accordingly set ventilation rate to serve occupancies proportionally. This research aimed to improve human occupancy detection and introduce HVAC fuzzy controller by estimating the occupancies number and set ventilation rate according to their requirement. The study uses thermal camera approach to collect occupancy information and methodological data as input to controller to operate HVAC equipment. The experimental analysis shows the  proposed controller have achieved significant energy saving and acceptable comfort level.

Published

2020-11-01

Issue

Section

Articles