Progress and methodologies of lifecycle commissioning of HVAC systems to enhance building sustainability

Building energy consumption keeps rising in recent years due to growth in population, increasing demand for healthy, comfort and productive indoor environment, global climate changing, etc. Nowadays, the contribution from buildings toward global energy consumption is approximately 40%. Most of energy use in buildings is for the provision of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC). High-level performance of HVAC systems in building lifecycle is critical to building sustainability. As a quality-oriented process, commissioning has been recognized as a valid means to improve performance of buildings and HVAC systems in both energy and environment aspects and should be conducted regularly or continuously throughout the whole building lifecycle. At the same time, building automation systems (BAS) are now standard in most modern buildings. Besides automatic monitoring and control of building services systems, automatic commissioning is a new expectation on modern BAS to save labor, time and cost required by manual commissioning and improve the effectiveness of commissioning. This paper firstly takes a brief look at current situation of building commissioning in research and application world wide, and then summarizes state-of-the-art techniques for automatic commissioning of HVAC systems. It is concluded that, to maximize benefits from commissioning for enhancing building sustainability, more efforts should be made to develop automatic commissioning tools which can be integrated with modern BAS.