Abstract
A cooperative control strategy is proposed for the air conditioning (AC) system and ventilation system to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection and save the energy of the AC system. This strategy integrates the dynamic model of the AC-cabin system, infection risk assessment, model predictive control (MPC) of the thermal environment inside the cabin, and ventilation control that considers passengers' sneezing. Unlike other existing AC system models, the thermal-health model established can describe not only the system performance but also the virus concentration and risk of COVID-19 infection using the Wells-Riley assessment model. Experiments are conducted to verify the prediction accuracy of the AC-cabin model. The results prove that the proposed model can accurately predict the evolution of cabin temperature under different cases. The cooperative control strategy of the AC system integrates the MPC-based refrigeration algorithm for the cabin temperature and intermittent ventilation strategy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection. This strategy well balances the control accuracy, energy consumption of the AC system, and the risk of COVID-19 infection, and greatly reduces the infection risk at the expense of a little rise in the energy consumption.