Digital Twin for Diagnosis of Belt Looseness in HVAC Systems using multi-body dynamics simulation

Abstract

Most heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems operate using a belt pulley system that provides high efficiency at a low cost. To monitor the health of the HVAC system, it is essential to detect looseness, which is one of the primary failure modes of belt-pulley systems. The main feature used to identify looseness is belt slip, which can be computed using the ratio of angular velocity and diameter between the drive pulley and driven pulley. However, accurately diagnosing the condition of the HVAC system based on the slip distribution calculated by measuring the rotational speed can be based on empirical criteria. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes constructing a digital twin model for accurate diagnosis of belt loosening in HVAC systems. The proposed approach involves performing multi-body dynamics (MBD) based time-domain analysis considering uncertainty. To validate the proposed model, belt looseness is applied to the HVAC system, and the slip distribution is calculated and compared with the results computed by the digital twin model. Through this comparison, it was demonstrated that the proposed model can be utilized to diagnose belt looseness in the HVAC system.