his thesis focuses on assessing and extending specific virtual sensors for rooftop units with micro-channel condensers, which are a growing part of the market. The rooftop unit virtual sensors provide low-cost measurements of the amount of refrigerant charge, cooling capacity and compressor power and are expected to be embedded within manufactured products in the factory. In addition, a low-cost approach for training the virtual refrigerant charge sensor in an open lab space was proposed and evaluated. The accuracy of virtual rooftop unit sensors were evaluated over a wide range of conditions using measurements obtained in environmental (psychrometric) chambers and were generally within +/-10% of the values determined from more direct measurements. The concept of low-cost open lab training for virtual charge sensor along with some guidelines to choose open lab training points was evaluated and found to give similar accuracy as sensors trained using a wide range of operating conditions. The total cost of embedding the three virtual sensors in a rooftop unit at a factory would be in the range of
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