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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]