Scientists develop algorithm to automatically detect heating, AC failures
The Community News/Mandi
A team of scientists from IIT Mandi and Universite de Lorraine in France have developed an algorithm to detect failures in heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC).
The study was authored by Dr Tushar Jain of IIT Mandi and Dr Joseph J Yame from French University and it has been published in Journal of Buildings Performance Simulation.
“HVAC systems are essential to maintain temperatures inside buildings but sensors and dampers in VAV boxes can become faulty and need repairs.
However, detecting and identifying these faults manually is a slow, costly, and error-prone process and delays can cause various problems to residents.
This also reduces building energy efficiency and the faults can increase the energy consumption of buildings by 4% to 18%,” IIT Mandi official said.
The scientists have an automated fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) algorithm that integrates with the building automation system (BAS) to address the issues.
This system helps maintenance crews identify and predict potential failures, analyze their impact, determine their importance to the BAS, and quickly direct repairs, ensuring that the system is always available.
Talking about the invention, Dr Tushar Jain said, “Our algorithm is robust against unmeasured disturbances and sensor noise, particularly the outdoor temperature, which affects the thermal dynamics of the building.”
Jain said they have used SIMBAD software, based on MATLAB, to simulate a one-storey building with three zones and show how well the developed algorithms work.
They tested four different single and multiple VAV damper fault cases in two different scenarios.
