A development of easy-to-use tool for fault detection and diagnosis in building air-conditioning systems

There are many reports about faulty status in building air-conditioning systems recently. It becomes difficult to keep indoor air temperature appropriately as faults occur, and the faults cause waste of building energy consumption. The model-based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods have been researched for specific parts of air-conditioning system such as chillers, coils, variable air volume units (VAV units), etc. It needs, however, much time and labor to monitor and check every single part because we cannot predict where and when the faults occur. The purpose of this study is to examine indoor air temperature changes and energy consumption increase when faults occur and to develop an easy-to-use FDD tool that helps to find out the faulty place through the whole building air-conditioning system. And then, we treat the reliability of the proposed FDD tool and effectiveness to control of indoor environment deterioration and energy consumption increase by the tool is evaluated based on building air-conditioning system simulation in this paper.