Enhancing Home Appliance Service by Improving Appliance Control Unit Diagnostics Capability

This paper presents an approach to increase the field service ability of home appliances by integrating advanced diagnostic capabilities into the Appliance Control Unit (ACU). Traditional maintenance practices often face challenges like complexity of appliance system, unable to identify exact root cause, access to components individually and simply identifying and rectifying faults in home appliances, leading to increased prolonged downtime and increased service cost and customer dissatisfaction. To address these issues, this paper proposes the integration of current sensing and voltage sensing circuit within the feedback loop of the ACU, enabling real- time monitoring of electrical parameters during operation. So that it will make it easier for service engineers to identify the correct component of malfunctioning and their data. ACU interprets these sensor circuit data to diagnose various operational irregularities, including motor strain, pump blockages, and voltage fluctuations, short circuit, and open circuit. The data obtained from the current and voltage sensing circuit is fed into the microcontroller. Subsequently, establishing a connection with the service module through the wire port connector, a connection with phone through bluetooth, facilitating seamless communication between devices. The validity of the proposed method was verified by analyzing the simulation and experimental results.