Advanced Sliding Mode Control of Heating and Ventilation Unit in a Light Rail Vehicle

Abstract

There is a pressing need for energy management with regard to modern rail vehicles, particularly in the case of electric vehicles (EVs), where various forms of energy and loads have to be considered for vehicle running. Air conditioning is an essential factor that ought to be profoundly analysed, as it can account for a significant proportion of electricity demand. This paper considers a lumped-parameter type thermal model of the passenger compartment of a tram in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances with an optimized heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system configuration. To overcome the aforementioned problem, a decoupled sliding mode control (SMC) is designed with the purpose of enabling a lower energy usage and providing the thermal comfort conditions in a tram as an efficient and durable control strategy. The temperature and concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) are regulated in a desirable way. A proportional, integral and derivative (PID) controller is employed for comparison purposes and for validating the proposed control scheme. According to the findings of this paper, the SMC outperforms the PID controller in terms of fast tracking and steady state for the desired tracking targets.

Keywords

• electric vehicle
• hvac
• robust control
• sliding mode control