Supermarket system characteristics and operating faults (RP-1615)

Abstract

Supermarkets undergo various types of operating faults that can require costly preventive maintenance, service, and repairs. Because supermarkets are growing in number and in the variety of system types and characteristics, information about common faults and equipment is essential prior to investing effort on the development of new fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) methods or other improvements to system design and operation. A study was conducted to investigate supermarket equipment characteristics, such as the prevalence of central vs. distributed systems, condenser types, control strategies, and common operating faults such as refrigerant leakage, failed evaporator or condenser fans, failed compressors, etc. The data come from four sources: expert surveys, facility management system messages, service calls, and service records. Some of the results of the study are that centralized direct expansion systems with on/off compressor capacity control strategy and air-cooled condensers are the most common system types and refrigerant charge problems are the most common source of equipment failure. Case-related problems, in aggregate, are the most frequently occurring faults in supermarkets.

Dataset of low global warming potential refrigerant refrigeration system for fault detection and diagnostics

“…BehFar et al . 11 investigated supermarket equipment characteristics and common operating faults based on data collected through expert surveys, facility management system messages, service calls, and service records. According to their study, the most commonly occurring faults are refrigerant leakage/undercharge/overcharge, oil problems, evaporator iced-up/fouling, control system problems, condenser fouling, compressor inefficiency, condenser fan or fan motor problems, evaporator fan or fan motor problems, the interaction of HVAC and refrigeration systems, control valves problems, cabinet glass door frosting, and liquid line restriction.…”

“…However, compared with other building HVAC and refrigeration equipment and systems 12 – 15 , such as air-handling units, rooftop units, package air-conditioning, chillers, heat pumps, furnaces, and supermarket refrigeration systems have not attracted sufficient attention from researchers to conduct FDD studies 11 . This is especially true for low-GWP refrigerant supermarket refrigeration systems, which have some unique characteristics in terms of FDD, such as high discharge pressure, a multistage compression system, a frequent defrost cycle for low-temperature (LT) evaporators, high air infiltration on medium-temperature (MT) open display cases, and doored display cases.…”

Research challenges and directions in HVAC fault prevalence

“…The data collection period varied from 4 hours of inspection Davis, Francisco, et al 2002) to 10 years of recording fault reports (Madani 2014). Further, although the type of samples varied between service record, component, system, and building, the number of samples varied from 1 (Dey et al 2016) to 371 (Shoukas et al 2020) buildings, 15 (Shoukas et al 2020) to 25,800 (Shoukas et al 2020) vapor compression systems, and 100 (Behfar et al 2018) to 177,240 (Behfar et al 2018) service records.…”

Robustness analysis of PCA-SVM model used for fault detection in supermarket refrigeration systems

“…In [3], the rule-based fault classifier achieved higher effectiveness than data-driven models when the FDD performance index is a controlled variable. The components characteristics and operations anomalies for different types of SRS are studied in [2]. In this study, three sources of the industry including expert surveys, advisory messages such as alarms, and service calls are considered.…”