A statistical fault detection and diagnosis method for centrifugal chillers based on exponentially-weighted moving average control charts and support vector regression

This paper presents a new fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) method for centrifugal chillers of building air-conditioning systems. Firstly, the Support Vector Regression (SVR) is adopted to develop the reference PI models. A new PI, namely the heat transfer efficiency of the sub-cooling section (εsc), is proposed to improve the FDD performance. Secondly, the Exponentially-Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) control charts are introduced to detect faults in a statistical way to improve the ratios of correctly detected points. Thirdly, when faults are detected, diagnosis follows which is based on a proposed FDD rule table. Six typical chiller component faults are concerned in this paper. This method is validated using the real-time experimental data from the ASHRAE RP-1043. Test results show that the combined use of SVR and EWMA can achieve the best performance. Results also show that significant improvements are achieved compared with a commonly used method using Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and t-statistic.