Comparative Analysis on Power Distribution Architectures for Commercial Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents comparison on power distribution architectures for commercial buildings. The purpose of this thesis is to give quantifiable methodologies and results which can be used to compare practical feasibilities among several architectures. The comparison targets for commercial building include AC distribution system, DC distribution system, AC/DC hybrid distribution system and AC distribution system with DC interface

system efficiency, system availability, economic feasibility are selected as comparison indices to measure the selected architectures. In order to draw a meaningful conclusion, detailed surveys on characteristic of commercial building are preceded

then, evaluation methodologies of the selected indices are investigated and applied to the target architectures. Different from several previous studies, each index is related to each other and entire procedures for evaluations and their relationships are organized synthetically. System efficiency is computed by system modeling and daily-scale simulation. System availability is calculated by combinational evaluation method based on components reliability parameters. Economic feasibility is assessed by life cycle costing (LCC) with net present value (NPV) method. Finally, comprehensive and relative comparisons on the four architectures are delivered based on the numerical results. For commercial building with the introduced case study, AC/DC hybrid distribution is the most efficient system

DC distribution has the highest system availability. AC distribution is found as the most economically feasible topology for commercial buildings.