Comparative investigations on reference models for fault detection and diagnosis in centrifugal chiller systems

• Published in: Energy and buildings 2016-12, Vol.133, p.246-256
• Main Authors: Tran, Dinh Anh Tuan, Chen, Youming, Jiang, Changliang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Centrifugal chiller; Chiller reference models; Chillers; Control charts; Fault detection; Fault detection and diagnosis; Fault diagnosis; HVAC; Kriging; Multiple linear regression; Radial basis function; Regression analysis; Strategy
• ISSN: 0378-7788; 1872-6178
• DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2016.09.062

•The accuracy comparisons illustrate that RBF is the most accurate among three investigated chiller reference models.•Diagnosis performance comparisons reveal that the FFD strategy employing RBF model performs best under various test cases.•Detection performance of EWMA residual control chart is better than that of t-statistic based method.•The FDD strategy employing the most accurate model has the best diagnosis performance. A successful fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) strategy for chillers is highly dependent on three core aspects, an accurate reference model, a sensitive fault detection technique and an effective fault identification method. An accurate model plays an important role in the performance of chiller FDD strategy. In this study, the accuracies of three models, MLR (multiple linear regression), KRG (Kriging) and RBF (radial basis function), are compared under various modeling criteria. The EWMA (exponentially-weighted moving average) residual control chart, which is a more powerful tool in detecting small shifts than t-statistics based method, is adopted as a sensitive fault detection technique. The most sensitive feature parameter method is improved to effectively identify faults. Seven common faults in typical centrifugal chillers are considered. Three strategies (MLR-EWMA, KRG-EWMA and RBF-EWMA), which are the combinations of three reference models with EWMA and the most sensitive feature parameter method, are validated and compared by using two sample datasets with different sizes from ASHRAE RP-1043. Through the comparisons of diagnosis performance, the most accurate chiller reference model is found and suggested to detect and diagnose faults in chiller systems. The comparison results show that the RBF-based strategy has the best diagnosis performances among the three strategies.