November 13, 2025
11:00 AM (Eastern US)
Overview
Join Christopher Laughman (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories) and Avinash Subramanian (JuliaHub) for a webinar exploring how advanced simulation tools can transform HVAC system modeling.
Accurately estimating refrigerant mass in vapor-compression systems such as air conditioners and heat pumps, is essential for both performance and environmental assessment. Traditional methods are invasive, costly, or insufficiently precise.
In this webinar, Laughman and Subramanian will share how MERL used Dyad’s (Formerly JuliaSim) ModelingToolkit-based workflows together with machine learning techniques to develop a non-invasive state estimation approach. By leveraging pressure and temperature data, their method can predict refrigerant mass and other hard-to-measure system variables with high accuracy, achieving errors of less than 2%.
What you’ll learn:
- The limitations of traditional diagnostic methods in HVAC systems
- How Dyad enables high-fidelity modeling of vapor-compression cycles
- Combining physics-based models and machine learning for improved state estimation
- A MERL case study demonstrating <2% error in refrigerant mass prediction
- The potential of simulation-driven approaches to improve diagnostics, efficiency, and sustainability in HVAC
Presenter: Christopher Laughman - Sr. Principal Research Staff, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
Christopher R. Laughman received the S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and the Ph.D. degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1999, 2001, and 2008, respectively. He has been with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, since 2008, where he currently holds the position of a Senior Principal Research Scientist and is the Senior Team Leader of the Multiphysical Systems Team. His research interests include the modeling, simulation, control, and optimization of large-scale multiphysical systems, with an emphasis on multiphase thermofluid applications.
Presenter: Avinash Subramanian - Software Engineer, Simulation, Control, and Optimization, JuliaHub
Dr. Avinash Subramanian holds a PhD in Energy and Process Engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Before joining JuliaHub in January 2023, where he specializes in simulation, optimization, and control, he was a graduate researcher at the Process Systems Engineering Laboratory in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. Avinash also served as a Lecturer at NTNU from August to December 2022, where he co-taught a PhD course on Mixed-Integer and Nonconvex Optimization in collaboration with Professor Paul Barton (MIT). His expertise bridges advanced optimization methods and their applications in process systems, energy, and industrial digital twin technologies.
