Cooling Tower Control

Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems (HVACs) are used to control temperature and humidity inside buildings. They use cooling towers at one end to expel excess heat from the refrigerant into the atmosphere. The heat is expelled through evaporative cooling. The rate of cooling depends on the cooling tower surface area, humidity, temperature, and speed of water and air.

An optimal controller will set fan speeds and output water temperature set-points such that they are physically possible, save energy. It will also try to maintain occupant comfort, making this a multi-objective optimization problem.

We use Reinforcement Learning to train controllers that can learn and operate across changing weather conditions while saving energy. The code and data for this system can be found here.