Our postdoctoral researcher, Himanshu Nagpal, presented at the Sixth Indian Control Conference, which was held at Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. The conference was devoted to advances in broad areas of control and system theory and their application in various areas. The ICC is held every year at a different academic institution in India. The organizer of the ICC is Control Society, a nonprofit society registered in India with the aim of fostering research and development activities in the broad domain of control and allied areas.
Schematic of wastewater assisted heat pump
Himanshu presented his work on improvement of energy efficiency in residential buildings using wastewater heat recovery and model predictive control. His work demonstrated that the temporal mismatches between recovered heat availability and space heating consumption can be efficiently mitigated using thermal inertia of the building as a passive storage and applying model predictive control strategy to operate the heating system of the building. The particular numerical case study presented in his paper demonstrated 26% reduction in total heating demand using wastewater heat recovery. The work presented is a small step forward in the direction of energy and water efficiency in domestic buildings.