Yan Qin, Wen-tai Li, Chau Yuen et al.
The sustaining evolution of sensing and advancement in communications technologies have revolutionized prognostics and health management for various electrical equipment towards data-driven ways. This revolution delivers a promising solution for the health monitoring problem of heat pump (HP) system, a vital device widely deployed in modern buildings for heating use, to timely evaluate its operation status to avoid unexpected downtime. Many HPs were practically manufactured and installed many years ago, resulting in fewer sensors available due to technology limitations and cost control at that time. It raises a dilemma to safeguard HPs at an affordable cost. We propose a hybrid scheme by integrating industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) and intelligent health monitoring algorithms to handle this challenge. To start with, an IIoT network is constructed to sense and store measurements. Specifically, temperature sensors are properly chosen and deployed at the inlet and outlet of the water tank to measure water temperature. Second, with temperature information, we propose an unsupervised learning algorithm named mixture slow feature analysis (MSFA) to timely evaluate the health status of the integrated HP. Characterized by frequent operation switches of different HPs due to the variable demand for hot water, various heating patterns with different heating speeds are observed. Slowness, a kind of dynamics to measure the varying speed of steady distribution, is properly considered in MSFA for both heating pattern division and health evaluation. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed method is verified through a real integrated HP with five connected HPs installed ten years ago. The experimental results show that MSFA is capable of accurately identifying health status of the system, especially failure at a preliminary stage compared to its competing algorithms.