Smart technologies for building life-cycle optimization and diagnosis

Climate change is a major problem we are facing. Hong Kong has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Building energy saving is essential to this mission because buildings consume over 90% of electricity in Hong Kong. Buildings are facing big challenges of energy saving and carbon emission reduction. Meanwhile, this is a new opportunity to reduce building operation cost.

• Building HVAC system optimal design, smart control technology, energy performance diagnosis and optimal scheme for existing systems.
• Building energy system data management platform and big data analytics
• Smart zero carbon distributed energy system and its associated technologies for multiple energy use, supply-demand side coordination and flexible energy use.

• The robust optimal design technology could provide optimized system design of robust energy performance and flexibility of on-site adaptive optimal commissioning under the existence of various uncertainties. On-site optimal adaptive commissioning allows the system to be tuned and balanced at optimal balance points.
• The online control optimization concerns the quality and uncertainty of online measurements, robustness and sensitivity of control strategies (to measurement uncertainties, change of working conditions), effective and robust online optimization techniques.
• Performance and fault diagnosis technologies provide building-level diagnosis with limited and poor quality data (information-poor buildings), effective energy system diagnosis of buildings with massive data (big data analytics/information super-rich building), HVAC component and sub-system diagnosis methods with low quality measurements and sensor faults, sensor and control fault diagnosis.
• Multi-energy complementary could maximize the energy efficiency of multiple energy sources. Supply-demand side coordination and and flexible energy use technologies utilized smart optimal control technologies to achieve building flexible energy use and contribute to grid balance.

• 2014 ASHRAE Technology Award: Category I – Commercial Buildings – New
• CIBSE Building Performance Awards 2015
• Environment Bureau EMSD HANSON I&T OUTSTANDING AWARD: Smart Optimal Control of Central Cooling and Air Conditioning System
• PolyU Distinguished Knowledge Transfer Excellence Awards, 2017 Technological Excellence Merit Ward: Optimal and Energy Efficient Design and Control of Building HVAC Systems
• PolyU The President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Knowledge Transfer, 2021 Team Awards in Knowledge Transfer: Industry

• Energy saving project for International Commerce Center (ICC). Annual saving: over 10 million kWh in the HVAC system.
• Energy saving projects for two pharmaceutical factories. Annual saving: 42% for the 1st factory (new system), 27% for the 2nd factory (existing system).
• Energy saving project for campus buildings in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Annual saving: 15-30%.
• Other energy saving projects, including HolidayInn Express, two MTR stations (To Kwa Wan station, Maritime Square Extension), New World Centre K11 MUSEA.