An enhanced chiller FDD strategy based on the combination of the LSSVR-DE model and EWMA control charts

Development of the fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) for chiller systems is very important for improving the equipment reliability and saving energy consumption. The results of FDD performance are strongly dependent on the accuracy of chiller models. Since the accuracy of the chiller models depends on the indefinite model parameters which are normally chosen by experiments or experiences, an accurate chiller model is difficult to build. Therefore, optimization of model parameters is very useful to increase the accuracy of chiller models. This paper presents a new FDD strategy for centrifugal chillers of building air-conditioning systems, which is the combination between the nonlinear least squares support vector regression (LSSVR) based on the differential evolution (DE) algorithm and the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts. In this strategy, the nonlinear LSSVR, which is a reformulation of SVR model with better generalization performances, is adopted to develop the reference feature parameter models in a typical non-linear chiller system. The DE algorithm which is a real-coding optimal algorithm with powerful global searching capacity is employed to enhance the accuracy of LSSVR models. The exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts are introduced to improve the fault detection capability as well as to reduce the Type II errors in a t-statistics-based way. Six typical faults of the chiller from the real-time experimental data of ASHRAE RP-1043 project are chosen to validate proposed FDD methods. Comprehensive comparisons between the proposed method and two similarly previous studies are performed. The comparison results show that the proposed method has achieved significant improvement in accuracy and reliability, especially at low severity levels. The proposed DE-LSSVR-EWMA strategy is robust for fault detection and diagnosis in centrifugal chiller systems.