A fault detection system for a geothermal heat exchanger sensor based on intelligent techniques

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology for dealing with an issue of crucial practical importance in real engineering systems such as fault detection and recovery of a sensor. The main goal is to define a strategy to identify a malfunctioning sensor and to establish the correct measurement value in those cases. As study case, we use the data collected from a geothermal heat exchanger installed as part of the heat pump installation in a bioclimatic house. The sensor behaviour is modeled by using six different machine learning techniques: Random decision forests, gradient boosting, extremely randomized trees, adaptive boosting, k-nearest neighbors, and shallow neural networks. The achieved results suggest that this methodology is a very satisfactory solution for this kind of systems.