Research on diagnostic strategy for faults in VRF air conditioning system using hybrid data mining methods

Abstract

VRF systems are always vulnerable to kinds of faults. Fault detection and diagnosis research should not only accurately identify these faults, but also be capable of obtaining explanations and support in thermodynamic theory. In this study, a strategy is proposed for four types of VRF system faults, including system-level and component-level. The strategy is based on hybrid data mining methods and analyzes the thermodynamic interpretation of the results at the same time. The first preprocessing step eliminates the effect of noise caused by defrosting action in heating mode. We apply unsupervised principal component analysis for feature extraction to reduce the dimensions of data sets. The correlation between principal components and features are investigated. Supervised Gauss naïve Bayes is used to establish the fault detection model with an accuracy of 98.6%. Besides, infrequent fault type is often difficult to be studied because of lacking sufficient data. Therefore, RUSBoost algorithm is used to solve the unbalanced set problem, and the results show enough competitiveness in the comparison of similar algorithms and online testing. Conclusive remarks confirm the truth that the proposed strategy enjoys high versatility, accuracy, and robustness.