Dynamic Models of a Home Refrigerator

Abstract

Home refrigerators produce a substantial part of the annual power consumption in an average household. To further improve the efficiency of these devices, new intelligent control solutions are required. These solutions necessitate the behaviour modeling of the refrigerators.We seek models with as simple structure as possible, since future intelligent controllers may use such models in real time, thus their evaluation must be feasible even on simple microcontrollers. We investigate various dynamic models to describe the behavior of the refrigerator, i.e. the cool-down and warm-up phases.For model parameter identification real data was collected from a real home refrigerator. Data processing, modeling and the parameter identification were performed in MATLAB environment.