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Thermally Activated Building Systems (TABS) are difficult to control due to the time lag between the control sending and the response of the indoor temperature. Energy management of systems having such a high inertia can be improved by optimizing the restart time thanks to both occupancy and weather anticipation. Predictive control is suitable for systems with numerous constrained inputs and outputs whose objective function varies over time such as buildings with intermittent occupancy. This work proposes to use a Model Predictive Control (MPC) for one TABS in particular: a floor heating system (FHS) of an experimental building. Conventional control techniques and a state of the art on the predictive control of FHS are presented. A complete control loop (sensor, actuator, controller) was implemented on an experimental room. The predictive controller that integrate the model selected in Part I is compared with two conventional control strategies. The energy saving potential of the predictive controller is confirmed by both local experimentation and simulation on three climates. The energy saving is close to 40% over the whole heating season with an improved or equivalent comfort situation compared to the other two reference strategies. The absolute gain is constant over the heating period but the most significant relative gains are obtained in the mid-season.

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The present work aims to propose the use of Peltier modules for the superficial heat flux measurement, as an alternative to conventional heat flux sensors. In this study, the function of Peltier modules (TEM) as heat flux sensors is compared to the Captec® heat flux sensors (FGT), based on the premise that conventional heat flux sensors such as Captec® have been proven to have acceptable performance for the heat flux measurement, i.e., conduction, convection and radiation. A simple measurement device and a simple general formulation for decoupling the convective and radiative parts from the heat flux measurement are proposed. The latter are implemented in an experimental case presenting weak convective and radiative heat fluxes, using a black-shiny couple of Peltier modules and a black-shiny couple of Captec. The radiative part was found to be the same when comparing FGT and TEM measurements. However, the convective part when using TEM measurements was found to be around two times larger than when using FGT measurement. It has been encountered that this difference is better explained by the geometrical and thermal properties of both sensors.

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