A robot fault diagnostic tool for flow rate sensors in air dampers and VAV terminals is presented to ensure well capacity of energy conservation in building air conditioning systems. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to detect the sensor faults including fixed bias, drifting bias and complete failure. To improve the detection efficiency, several PCA models are built through employing the conservation equations and control relations of the system. With the historical data, PCA models are trained to capture most useful information of normal operation. As a result, the training models can identify whether the present condition is abnormal through comparing the residues with the thresholds. Since the principal component subspace and residue subspace of the operation data space are obtained using PCA decomposition, these two subspaces are used to develop the fault isolation scheme. The new fault detected and the known ones in the library are all projected into the principal component subspace and residue subspace decomposed by PCA. The joint angle plot, illustrating the direction relations of the projections in both subspaces between the new fault and the known ones, is used to diagnose the fault source. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.