Program Administration

Funded by California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program

AHU and VAV Box Diagnostics

Project Goals
The goal of this project is to enable the building controls industry to provide AHU and VAV box FDD tools embedded within their own control products.

Project Objectives

Remove the remaining barriers to commercializing APAR and VPACC (the automated AHU and VAV Box FDD tools developed by NIST).

By involving the controls manufacturers directly in the field tests, the reliability and effectiveness of the FDD tools will be demonstrated, increasing confidence in this technique. The current embedded versions of the tools are written using generic mathematical functions available in the languages in which the controllers are programmed. Although this approach is suitable for a technology demonstration, built-in FDD functions would greatly simplify the task of embedding diagnostics in the control programs for AHUs and VAV boxes, and is therefore necessary for their widespread commercial use. By giving the manufacturers hands-on experience with FDD it will encourage the manufacturers to develop such built-in functions. NIST will use the data from these field tests to develop sets of robust parameters to be used for the FDD algorithms, as well as the criteria to determine when each set should be used, so they can be used without the collection and analysis of trend data from each potential installation.
One or more HVAC controls manufacturer will offer automated diagnostics in its AHU and VAV box controller products as a result of this project.

Competitive pressure will then give the other manufacturers a powerful incentive to provide their products with similar capabilities. NIST has ongoing partnerships with Alerton, Automated Logic, and Delta Controls, and is currently in discussions with Siemens Building Technologies. These firms are all well established in the market. Their products are widely distributed across the U.S. and overseas. In addition, these partners have provided hardware, software, and technical support to NIST to support control systems research, indicating a commitment to advancing the state of the art, as well as reducing the threshold for technological buy-in. Furthermore, the controls manufacturers have access, either at their headquarters facilities or through their local representatives, to a wide variety of sites for the field tests. Securing the commitment of one or more of these potential partners to commercialize AHU and VAV box diagnostics is critical to the success of the proposed project. NIST has secured verbal commitments from all four manufacturers, and is currently working out the details of a written agreement.

Updated August 25, 2004