Fault diagnosis and augmented reality-based troubleshooting of HVAC systems

Abstract

Maintaining Heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings and vehicles in superior condition is essential to energy waste minimization, increased equipment availability and improved thermal comfort of occupants. HVAC systems are complex interconnected systems. Consequently, early detection and diagnosis of incipient faults in such systems using robust methodologies and tools is salient for achieving thermal comfort. The increased complexity, cross-subsystem fault propagation, and the associated information propagation delays in networked HVAC systems makes fault diagnosis and maintenance a challenging task. This motivates us to incorporate the emerging technologies, such as real-time monitoring, remote diagnosis and augmented reality (AR) technologies, for efficient fault diagnosis and troubleshooting in such systems. This paper presents an integrated AR-based framework to monitor an HVAC system (or any cyber-physical system) in real-time, access system health information remotely and act on that information proactively to prevent or minimize the system down time.