Methods for Fault Detection , Diagnostics , and Prognostics for Building Systems — A Review , Part I

Poorly maintained, degraded, and improperly controlled equipment wastes an estimated 15% to 30% of energy used in commercial buildings. Much of this waste could be prevented with widespread adoption of automated condition-based maintenance. Automated fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) along with prognostics provide a cornerstone for condition-based maintenance of engineered systems. Although FDD has been an active area of research in other fields for more than a decade, applications for heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC&R) and other building systems have lagged those in other industries. Nonetheless, over the last decade there has been considerable research and development targeted toward developing FDD methods for HVAC&R equipment. Despite this research, there are still only a handful of FDD tools that are deployed in the field. This paper is the first of a two-part review of methods for automated FDD and prognostics whose intent is to increase awareness of the HVAC&R research and development community to the body of FDD and prognostics developments in other fields as well as advancements in the field of HVAC&R. This first part of the review focuses on generic FDD and prognostics, providing a framework for categorizing methods, describing them, and identifying their primary strengths and weaknesses. The second paper in this review, to be published in the April 2005 International Journal of HVAC&R Research, will address research and applications specific to the fields of HVAC&R.