The rising demand for heat pumps has exposed bottlenecks in production, installation, and maintenance processes. With the growing number of heat pumps in operation, service requests are expected to increase due to wear. To prevent shifting bottlenecks from installation to maintenance, it is crucial to reduce maintenance efforts now. Predictive maintenance is a widely used method to detect abnormal system behavior before inefficiency or damage occurs, but this requires suitable measurement techniques and evaluation methods.

We developed a specialized heat pump test bench to investigate soft faults and identify effective detection methods for the refrigerant cycle, focusing primarily on refrigerant leakage. Our research explores how refrigerant charge levels affect the performance ...