Search

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]

Variable refrigerant flow systems account for a considerable portion of energy consumption in buildings. In order to improve the energy efficiency and estimate the energy saving potentials of variable refrigerant flow systems this study proposes a data mining based method to identify and interpret the power consumption patterns and associations. Two descriptive data mining algorithms, clustering analysis and association rules mining, are used for data partitioning and association mining. The proposed method consists of four phases: data pre-processing, data partitioning, data association mining and knowledge interpretation. Experimental data collected from a tested variable refrigerant flow system in the standard psychrometer testing room are pre-processed and prepared to examine the proposed method. Three time independent influential factors: part load ratio, refrigerant charge level and cooling condition are analyzed. Results show that the method is able to help identify energy consumption patterns and extract energy consumption rules in variable refrigerant flow systems. Three distinct energy consumption patterns are identified: undercharge fault, low and high part load ratio conditions. For compressor operation frequency switch control and refrigerant undercharge patterns, the energy saving potentials could be estimated by making comparisons between energy patterns and rules in a top-down way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]