Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults

Air handling systems are the key sub-systems of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. They condition and deliver air to satisfy human thermal comfort requirements and provide acceptable indoor air quality. Faults in their components and sensors may lead to high-energy consumption,...

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Main Authors: Ying Yan, Peter B. Luh, Krishna R. Pattipati
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8301025/
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author Ying Yan
Peter B. Luh
Krishna R. Pattipati
author_facet Ying Yan
Peter B. Luh
Krishna R. Pattipati
author_sort Ying Yan
collection DOAJ
description Air handling systems are the key sub-systems of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. They condition and deliver air to satisfy human thermal comfort requirements and provide acceptable indoor air quality. Faults in their components and sensors may lead to high-energy consumption, poor thermal comfort, and unacceptable indoor air quality. Additionally, new types of faults may falsely be identified as known types. Identifying failure modes and their severities with low false identification rates is thus critical to know what faults occur and how severe they are. However, this is challenging, since 1) classifying both failure modes and fault severities generates many categories of failures, leading to high computational requirements; 2) updating model parameters to adapt to changing environments requires accurate recursive equations that are hard to obtain; and 3) model errors and measurement noise may cause high false identification rates in detecting new types of faults. In this paper, failure modes are identified by hidden Markov models (HMMs) and fault severities are estimated by filtering methods, leading to a decrease in the number of HMM states and low computational requirements. To adapt to changing environments, a new online learning algorithm is developed. In this algorithm, HMM parameters are obtained based on their posterior distributions given new observations, thereby avoiding the need for accurate recurrence equations. To identify new fault types with low false identification rates, a robust statistical method is developed to compare current HMM observations with those expected from existing states to obtain potential new types, and then confirm new types by checking whether observations have a significant change. Physical knowledge is then used to find the reason for the new fault type. Experimental results show that failure modes and fault severities of both known and new types of faults are identified with high accuracy.
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spelling doaj.art-aa6d8e15190c4e8cb1e26a97950c7b422022-12-21T20:30:27ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362018-01-016216822169610.1109/ACCESS.2018.28063738301025Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of FaultsYing Yan0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3609-0496Peter B. Luh1Krishna R. Pattipati2Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USAElectrical and Computer Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USAElectrical and Computer Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USAAir handling systems are the key sub-systems of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. They condition and deliver air to satisfy human thermal comfort requirements and provide acceptable indoor air quality. Faults in their components and sensors may lead to high-energy consumption, poor thermal comfort, and unacceptable indoor air quality. Additionally, new types of faults may falsely be identified as known types. Identifying failure modes and their severities with low false identification rates is thus critical to know what faults occur and how severe they are. However, this is challenging, since 1) classifying both failure modes and fault severities generates many categories of failures, leading to high computational requirements; 2) updating model parameters to adapt to changing environments requires accurate recursive equations that are hard to obtain; and 3) model errors and measurement noise may cause high false identification rates in detecting new types of faults. In this paper, failure modes are identified by hidden Markov models (HMMs) and fault severities are estimated by filtering methods, leading to a decrease in the number of HMM states and low computational requirements. To adapt to changing environments, a new online learning algorithm is developed. In this algorithm, HMM parameters are obtained based on their posterior distributions given new observations, thereby avoiding the need for accurate recurrence equations. To identify new fault types with low false identification rates, a robust statistical method is developed to compare current HMM observations with those expected from existing states to obtain potential new types, and then confirm new types by checking whether observations have a significant change. Physical knowledge is then used to find the reason for the new fault type. Experimental results show that failure modes and fault severities of both known and new types of faults are identified with high accuracy.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8301025/Fault diagnosisHVAC air handling systemonline learning algorithmhidden Markov modelnew fault types
spellingShingle Ying Yan
Peter B. Luh
Krishna R. Pattipati
Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
IEEE Access
Fault diagnosis
HVAC air handling system
online learning algorithm
hidden Markov model
new fault types
title Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
title_full Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
title_fullStr Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
title_full_unstemmed Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
title_short Fault Diagnosis of Components and Sensors in HVAC Air Handling Systems With New Types of Faults
title_sort fault diagnosis of components and sensors in hvac air handling systems with new types of faults
topic Fault diagnosis
HVAC air handling system
online learning algorithm
hidden Markov model
new fault types
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8301025/
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AT krishnarpattipati faultdiagnosisofcomponentsandsensorsinhvacairhandlingsystemswithnewtypesoffaults