Building Life-Cycle Commissioning and Optimisation: Approach and Practice

The energy consumption of buildings has increased rapidly worldwide in recent years. Building systems usually do not work as efficiently as intended due to various faults in their life-cycle. This paper presents a series of life-cycle commissioning and optimisation approaches that intend to realise the energy efficient operation of the overall heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system practically. At design stage, optimisations and commissioning are performed to optimise the system configuration and components selection, making the designs proper and correct. At the construction stage, commissioning is conducted to construct and install systems (e.g. HVAC components, instrumentations) correctly. At the testing and commission and operation stages, commissioning is made to ensure systems operate as well as the design intent in real operations. Optimal control strategies are developed and implemented to push the system approach to its best performance, often exceeding design intent (normal standard). A simplified energy performance assessment method based on macroscopic energy balance principles is developed for assessing the performance of information-poor buildings. The proposed methods have been implemented in many new and existing real buildings. Significant energy benefits have been achieved.