Adaptive variable structure observer for system states and disturbances estimation with application to building climate control system in a smart grid

In order to reach the ambitious net-zero emission target by 2050, various technological solutions need to be developed to ensure efficient utilisation of energy. Commercial and residential buildings are a big source of greenhouse gas emissions, where efficient utilisation of energy can play a major role towards decarbonisation of the buildings sector. Heat pumps have recently emerged as an effective solution for space heating applications in buildings. Energy-efficient operation of heat pumps will make a significant contribution toward making buildings energy-efficient. In this context, heat pump control systems have a major role. Some of the existing literature on the heat pump control systems assume that various system states are available to measure. This may not always be true and/or economical to measure all the states. Moreover, the system is subject to various disturbances which cannot be directly measured. To reduce the number of sensors in heat pump control systems, an adaptive observer is developed in this paper to estimate inaccessible system states and disturbances simultaneously. An advantage of the proposed approach is that it does not require any bound on the disturbance itself, however, only assumes that the rate of change of disturbance is bounded. This is always the case in practice. In the developed method, adaptive control techniques and variable structure control techniques are combined to implement the proposed observer. In order to estimate the unknown disturbance, an augmented systems model is considered. Globally uniformly ultimately bounded property of the error dynamical systems is established by suitably designing the adaptive laws. The developed method is applied to a model of the heat dynamics of a house floor heating system connected to a ground source-based heat pump. Different disturbance signals formats and amplitudes are considered to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed method.