Fault detection is beneficial for chiller routine operation management in building automation systems. Considering the limitations of traditional principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm for chiller fault detection, a so-called kernel entropy component analysis (KECA) method has been developed and the development results are reported in this paper. Unlike traditional PCA, in KECA, the feature extraction or dimensionality reduction is implemented in a new space, called kernel feature space. The new space is nonlinearly related to the input space. The data set in the kernel feature space is projected onto a principal component subspace constructed by the feature space principal axes determined by the maximum Rényi entropy rather than the top eigenvalues. The proposed KECA is more suitable to deal with nonlinear process without Gaussian assumption. Using the available experimental data from ASHRAE RP-1043, seven typical chiller faults were tested by the proposed KECA method, and the results were compared to that of PCA. Two statistics, i.e. T2 and squared prediction error (SPE), were employed for fault detection monitoring. The fault detection results showed that the proposed KECA method had a better performance in terms of a higher detection accuracy in comparison to the traditional PCA. For the seven typical faults, the fault detection ratios were over 55％, even at their corresponding least severity level when using the proposed KECA based chiller fault detection method.