Smart Audio Sensing‐Based HVAC Monitoring

This chapter proposes a Smart Audio SEnsing‐based Maintenance (SASEM) system that has a single unifying intellectual focus, that is, enabling predictive maintenance of building equipment by autonomously monitoring and analyzing their acoustic emissions. Through SASEM, it aims to develop and mature the science of using acoustic signals for system assessment prognosis of centralized HVAC systems. Acoustic data of centralized HVAC systems is gathered in real time and processed for environmental decision making from four buildings ‐ the three are in the University of Florida (UFL) campus and the fourth is the Flexible Research Platform situated in Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) campus. The chapter also proposes novel hardware and middleware for audio data gathering using wireless acoustic sensor networks and cloud computing and effective machine learning‐based classifiers to identify acoustic characteristics of building equipment.