An efficient VRF system fault diagnosis strategy for refrigerant charge amount based on PCA and dual neural network model

Highlights: • A new evaluation method shows the diagnosis results reliability. • PCA extracts more than 97% of the feature information. • The fault diagnosis strategy has increased above 9% for three classes. • The accuracy improvement can achieve 26.76% for undercharge fault. - Abstract: A fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) strategy is critical for the refrigerant charge amount (RCA) fault since improper RCA may affect the operational performance of a variable refrigerant flow system. The author's former work proposes a FDD strategy for the RCA fault. However, three aspects of the former FDD strategy need improvement, i.e. model performance evaluation, more feature information preservation and fault diagnosis accuracy (FDA), especially for the undercharge fault. Firstly, with regard to the model performance evaluation, the concept of a confidence space is proposed to evaluate the FDD model. Secondly, principle component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimension of all feature variables to improve the computational efficiency while preserving almost all feature information. Finally, in order to improve the FDA for the undercharge fault, a dual neural network model for the RCA fault diagnosis strategy has been adopted. The results show that a confidence space can effectively reflect the reliability of fault diagnosis, and the PCA reduces nearly half of the dimension while preserving more than 97% of the feature information, more importantly, the dual neural network improves the correct classification ratio (CCR) more than 9% for three classes (undercharge, normal charge, overcharge), with CCR for the undercharge fault improving by 26.8%.