Experimental Determination of Demand Response Control Models and Cost of Control for Ensembles of Window-Mount Air Conditioners

TL;DR

This study develops an experimental test system to model and evaluate the control response and cost of control for window-mount air conditioners used in electrical grid regulation, providing a controlled environment for accurate measurement.

Contribution

It introduces a laboratory-scale test system that isolates and measures the control response and cost of control for window-mount air conditioners, filling a gap in experimentally-based models.

Findings

Control response functions characterized under harmonic perturbations

Cost of control quantified in a controlled environment

Modeling approach isolates device response from environmental variability

Abstract

Control of consumer electrical devices for providing electrical grid services is expanding in both the scope and the diversity of loads that are engaged in control, but there are few experimentally-based models of these devices suitable for control designs and for assessing the cost of control. A laboratory-scale test system is developed to experimentally evaluate the use of a simple window-mount air conditioner for electrical grid regulation services. The experimental test bed is a single, isolated air conditioner embedded in a test system that both emulates the thermodynamics of an air conditioned room and also isolates the air conditioner from the real-world external environmental and human variables that perturb the careful measurements required to capture a model that fully characterizes both the control response functions and the cost of control. The control response functions and cost of control are measured using harmonic perturbation of the temperature set point and a test protocol that further isolates the air conditioner from low frequency environmental variability.