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Data-driven approach has emerged as a popular research method for fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) of variable refrigerant flow system. However, one serious issue has been raised in recent studies, which shows that training classifiers with datasets which suffer of imbalanced class distributions can significantly influence the final classification accuracy. So, aiming at the imbalanced dataset environment problem of variable refrigerant flow (VRF) system based on data-driven fault detect and diagnosis, we conducted a study. First of all, through comparative research, it is concluded that the geometric mean accuracy of the fault detection in the VRF system has reduced an average of 42.49% due to the imbalanced data environment. Then we proposed a Principal Component Analysis-Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (PCA-SMOTE) method to save this problem, and verified the reliability and versatility of the proposed method with three types of modeling algorithms commonly used in VRF systems. The result shows that this method not only has obvious improvement effect, but also has strong versatility. In the end, we gradually reduce the number of minority from 50 to 10 to explore minimum fault data requirements of this method. The final result shows that this method can still ensure that common machine learning algorithms can effectively detect and diagnosis the VRF system fault when only 10 fault data are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel fault diagnosis strategy is proposed using the GMM method. • The principal component analysis is selected for data dimensionality reduction. • Evaluations are made using four faults data of the VRF system experiments. • The established PCA-GMM has better fault diagnosis performance and reduced runtime. The timely fault diagnosis of HVAC systems is important for building energy saving, equipment maintenance and indoor comfort. The Gaussian mixture model method has rarely been studied in the fault diagnosis application of HVAC systems. Therefore, a novel fault diagnosis strategy is proposed based on the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) method for the variable refrigerant flow air-conditioning system. To reduce excessive input variables resulting in large model complexity and long running time, the principal component analysis approach (PCA) is used to perform data dimensionality reduction. Therefore, the fault diagnosis model combining the Gaussian mixture model and principal component analysis is established, which is evaluated using the four types of faults of the variable refrigerant flow system. These faults include refrigerant undercharge, refrigerant overcharge, outdoor unit fouling and four-way reversing valve faults. Experiments are carried out under three heating conditions. Results show that the PCA-GMM approach can effectively reduce the running time. Especially for the VVV type model, the running time is reduced from 176.78 s to 15.18 s. Meanwhile, established PCA-GMMs still have good fault diagnosis correct rates when the input data dimension is reduced. Especially, some PCA-GMMs have fault diagnosis correct rates of over 99% when the number of principal components exceeds 7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a statistical training data cleaning strategy for PCA-based chiller sensor Fault Detection, Diagnosis and Data Reconstruction method. Finding and removing outliers from the original training data set, the training data quality can be improved by the presented data-cleaning strategy. This can enhance the efficiency of the fault detection and increase the accuracy of the data reconstruction. Outliers cannot be easily found in the original data set used for training the PCA model. These outliers would severely affect the projection directions of PCA's two orthogonal subspaces (PC subspace and Residual subspace). Therefore, the threshold of Q -statistic is changed by the unexpected projection subspaces so that the detection efficiency of the sensor fault is decreased. The Euclidean distance was employed as an index to detect outliers from the original training data. In order to achieve optimal training data for the sensor FDDR, the z -scores of each sample's Euclidean Distance were employed as the key to remove the outliers. A field measured data set of a screw water-cooled chiller was used to validate the presented strategy. Results demonstrate that the quality of the training data is optimized and sensor fault detection efficiency, as well as the reconstruction data accuracy, is improved when compared to the normal PCA method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a self adaptive chiller sensor fault detection strategy based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method, namely a self-Adaptive Principal Component Analysis (APCA) method. The original data set used to train the PCA model usually contains some error samples, whose useless residual subspace information make the threshold of Q-statistic higher than the expected threshold. This leads to a low sensitivity and low fault detection efficiency at low sensor fault levels. APCA is developed to automatically remove error samples in the original data set in order to improve fault detection efficiency especially for temperature sensor faults with absolute magnitude less than 1°C. The self adaptive process of APCA has been presented and been compared with the Normal Principal Component Analysis (NPCA) method. The APCA strategy is validated by the operational data of a screw chiller system in a real electric factory. The results show that the APCA method can significantly enhance the fault detection efficiency, and the symmetry for positive and negative fault levels with same absolute magnitude becomes better than NPCA method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Sensor faults of air conditioning systems are harmful to optimal control strategies and system performance resulting in poor control of the indoor environment and waste of energy. In order to improve the fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) performance, this paper presents an enhanced sensor fault detection and diagnosis method based on the Satizky-Golay (SG) method and principal component analysis (PCA) method for the VRF system, namely SG-PCA method. Due to the volatility of the original data set of VRF system, the original data are smoothed using SG method at first. Then, the smoothed data are used for PCA model training and fault detection and diagnosis. In order to determine parameters of the SG method, an optimization index is proposed, which is calculated by the signal to noise ratio (SNR), the standard deviation (SD) and the self-detection efficiency. This SG-PCA method for VRF system sensor FDD is validated using field operation data of the VRF system. Various sensor faults at different fault levels are introduced. The results have showed that the SG-PCA method can significantly improve the fault detection and diagnosis performance compared to conventional PCA method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an entire sensor fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) for screw chiller system using the support vector data description (SVDD) algorithm. It has advantages of solving problems on describing non-linear and non-Gaussian distributed data. A distance-based D -statistic plot is employed to detect sensor faults. Based on the distance transformation in mathematical way, a new distance variation-based DV -contribution plot is proposed to diagnose the sensor fault. The screw chiller field measured data is utilized to train the SVDD model via a hybrid parameter tuning approach combined the grid search and the 10-fold cross validation. Six typical sensor faults are introduced for validation, i.e. positive and negative biases, positive and negative drifts, precision degradation and complete failure. Test results of both D -statistic and DV -contribution plots show that the SVDD-based method has good FDD results for the six sensor faults. Furthermore, the proposed DV -contribution plot shows more accurate fault diagnosis results compared with the principal component analysis (PCA)-based Q -contribution plot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting the faults at the incipient stage is important for keeping chiller systems healthy and saving energy and maintenance cost. Traditional principle component analysis (PCA) and support vector data description (SVDD) methods are insensitive to two common faults, condenser fouling (CdF) and refrigerant leakage (RfL). To improve the fault detection performance, this study proposed a PCA-R-SVDD based method. Instead of principle component subspace (PCs), it develops a SVDD model in the residual subspace (Rs) using the PCA modeling residual data. The SVDD based distance based monitoring statistic was used for fault detection. The proposed method shows significant improvement comparing with the traditional methods due to the better fault data distribution and tighter monitoring statistic. It is sensitive to six common faults. At least 50% of the fault data can be correctly detected even at the least severe fault level. Centrifugal chiller experimental data from the ASHRAE Research Project 1043 (RP-1043) was used to evaluate the methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an algebraic solution of erroneous sensor's undetectable boundary to evaluate the sensitivity of chiller sensor fault detection based on principal component analysis. Q -statistic of PCA is normally applied as a collective statistical index to detect sensor fault by comparing its value with the threshold. However, Q -statistic has no specific physical meaning and cannot evaluate the sensitivity of the provided method for sensor fault detection. We analyzed the definition of Q -statistic and derived the numerical value of the minimum range not to detect sensor fault. Bias sensor fault of a fielded screw chiller was studied for each sensor in PCA model by introducing different severity levels. Results showed that each sensor has different fault detection sensitivity using the same PCA model. The undetectable boundary can be a criterion used to evaluate the detection sensitivity of PCA-based method easily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The proposed strategy aims at system- and component-level fault types of VRF systems. • An infrequent fault type of VRF systems is studied. • The FDD strategy is based on hybrid data mining methods. • The results are explained and supported by thermodynamics theory. • The established models can accurately detect and diagnose faults of VRF systems. VRF systems are always vulnerable to kinds of faults. Fault detection and diagnosis research should not only accurately identify these faults, but also be capable of obtaining explanations and support in thermodynamic theory. In this study, a strategy is proposed for four types of VRF system faults, including system-level and component-level. The strategy is based on hybrid data mining methods and analyzes the thermodynamic interpretation of the results at the same time. The first preprocessing step eliminates the effect of noise caused by defrosting action in heating mode. We apply unsupervised principal component analysis for feature extraction to reduce the dimensions of data sets. The correlation between principal components and features are investigated. Supervised Gauss naïve Bayes is used to establish the fault detection model with an accuracy of 98.6%. Besides, infrequent fault type is often difficult to be studied because of lacking sufficient data. Therefore, RUSBoost algorithm is used to solve the unbalanced set problem, and the results show enough competitiveness in the comparison of similar algorithms and online testing. Conclusive remarks confirm the truth that the proposed strategy enjoys high versatility, accuracy, and robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]