Study of Building Demand Response Method Based on Indoor Temperature Setpoint Control of VRV Air Conditioning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript investigates a feasible method of building demand response and validates in a demonstration project. The study is within scope of the journal. The paper is suggested to accept after following questions are answered.

1 The main conclusion of this study is the feasibility of the proposed demand response method in office buildings. Discussions and analysis should pay more attentions to the application effects of this method.

2 The control system which performs demand response, i.e., controller or devices, used in on-site test is better to be briefly described in Section 4.3.

3 Usually, COP of a HVAC system varies with part load ratio. The authors should explain that why COP is assumed to be a constant and this will not affect results.

Author Response

The authors thank for the reviewer's suggestions.

Please see the point-by-point response letter in the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript investigates a building demand response method based on indoor temperature setpoint control of air conditioning system. The study is within scope of the journal, however there is still room for the paper to be improved. Some of the key questions that the authors can clarify include

1. The focus of this work seems to be the temperature setup of the AC. How is the humidity of the supply air being considered in this study?
2. State clearly what are the key assumptions for this study.
3. Equation (1) seems to be simplistic that considers sensible loads. As building load comprises both sensible and latent, how is the latent load considered in this work?
4. The COP of a cooling system is often not the same due to supply of varying chilled water temperature. How is the effect of a varying COP come into play for this study?
5. The supply air conditions due to different temperature setpoint needs to be illustrated on a psychrometric chart to appreciate the dynamic change of the air supplied conditions.
6. For figure 6, please provide clear explanation why the HVAC load (modelling) curve has large degree of fluctuations? Further, the degree of discrepancies seems to be fairly significant compared to actual site data on HVAC load.
7. What are the uncertainties of the experimental data?
8. Error bars need to be displayed for all experimental data in the graphs.
9. A simple techno-economic study should be included to demonstrate benefits of the proposed method.
10. Describe clearly what are the limitation(s) of this work and how should these limitations be addressed in a future work.
11. Lots of grammatical and sentence structural errors have been detected in this paper. The language quality of the paper needs significant improvement. The assistance of a native speaker should be solicited.

Author Response

The authors thank for the reviewer's suggestions.

Please see the point-by-point response letter in the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf