Integration of a failure monitoring within a hybrid dynamic simulation environment

The complexity and the size of the industrial chemical processes induce the monitoring of a growing number of process variables. Their knowledge is generally based on the measurements of system variables and on the physico-chemical models of the process. Nevertheless this information is imprecise because of process and measurement noise. So the research ways aim at developing new and more powerful techniques for the detection of process fault. In this work, we present a method for the fault detection based on the comparison between the real system and the reference model evolution generated by the extended Kalman filter. The reference model is simulated by the dynamic hybrid simulator, PrODHyS. It is a general object-oriented environment which provides common and reusable components designed for the development and the management of dynamic simulation of industrial systems. The use of this method is illustrated through a didactic example relating to the field of Chemical Process System Engineering

Wind turbine condition monitoring : technical and commercial challenges.

Deployment of larger scale wind turbine systems, particularly offshore, requires more organized operation and maintenance strategies to ensure systems are safe, profitable and cost-effective. Among existing maintenance strategies, reliability centred maintenance is regarded as best for offshore wind turbines, delivering corrective and proactive (i.e. preventive and predictive) maintenance techniques enabling wind turbines to achieve high availability and low cost of energy. Reliability centred maintenance analysis may demonstrate that an accurate and reliable condition monitoring system is one method to increase availability and decrease the cost of energy from wind. In recent years, efforts have been made to develop efficient and cost-effective condition monitoring techniques for wind turbines. A number of commercial wind turbine monitoring systems are available in the market, most based on existing techniques from other rotating machine industries. Other wind turbine condition monitoring reviews have been published but have not addressed the technical and commercial challenges, in particular, reliability and value for money. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap and present the wind industry with a detailed analysis of the current practical challenges with existing wind turbine condition monitoring technology

Modeling and fault tolerant control of an electro-hydraulic actuator

In the modern industry, electro-hydraulic actuators (EHAs) have been applied to various applications for precise position pressure/ force control tasks. However, operating EHAs under sensor faults is one of the critical challenges for the control engineers. For its enormous nonlinear characteristics, sensor fault could lead the catastrophic failure to the overall system or even put human life in danger. Thus in this paper, a study on mathematical modeling and fault tolerant control (FTC) of a typical EHA for tracking control under sensor-fault conditions has been carried out. In the proposed FTC system, the extended Kalman-Bucy unknown input observer (EKBUIO) -based robust sensor fault detection and identification (FDI) module estimates the system states and the time domain fault information. Once a fault is detected, the controller feedback is switched from the faulty sensor to the estimated output from the EKBUIO owing to mask the sensor fault swiftly and retains the system stability. Additionally, considering the tracking accuracy of the EHA system, an efficient brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (BELBIC) is suggested as the main control unit. Effectiveness of the proposed FTC architecture has been investigated by experimenting on a test bed using an EHA in sensor failure conditions

Fouling Detection in Heat Exchangers

This paper deals with the design of a nonlinear observer for the purpose of detecting the fouling phenomenon that commonly occurs in heat exchangers. First, the general model of the heat exchanger is presented in terms of partial differential equations. Next, a simplified lump model is derived that is suitable for the observer design. The observer gains are generated by using appropriate Lyapunov functions, equations and inequalities

Unknown input observer approaches to robust fault diagnosis

This thesis focuses on the development of the model-based fault detection and isolation /fault detection and diagnosis (FDI/FDD) techniques using the unknown input observer (UIO) methodology. Using the UI de-coupling philosophy to tackle the robustness issue, a set of novel fault estimation (FE)-oriented UIO approaches are developed based on the classical residual generation-oriented UIO approach considering the time derivative characteristics of various faults. The main developments proposed are:- Implement the residual-based UIO design on a high fidelity commercial aircraft benchmark model to detect and isolate the elevator sensor runaway fault. The FDI design performance is validated using a functional engineering simulation (FES) system environment provided through the activity of an EU FP7 project Advanced Fault Diagnosis for Safer Flight Guidance and Control (ADDSAFE).- Propose a linear time-invariant (LTI) model-based robust fast adaptive fault estimator (RFAFE) with UI de-coupling to estimate the aircraft elevator oscillatory faults considered as actuator faults.- Propose a UI-proportional integral observer (UI-PIO) to estimate actuator multiplicative faults based on an LTI model with UI de-coupling and with added H∞ optimisation to reduce the effects of the sensor noise. This is applied to an example on a hydraulic leakage fault (multiplicative fault) in a wind turbine pitch actuator system, assuming that thefirst derivative of the fault is zero. - Develop an UI–proportional multiple integral observer (UI-PMIO) to estimate the system states and faults simultaneously with the UI acting on the system states. The UI-PMIO leads to a relaxed condition of requiring that the first time derivative of the fault is zero instead of requiring that the finite time fault derivative is zero or bounded. - Propose a novel actuator fault and state estimation methodology, the UI–proportional multiple integral and derivative observer (UI-PMIDO), inspired by both of the RFAFE and UI-PMIO designs. This leads to an observer with the comprehensive feature of estimating faults with bounded finite time derivatives and ensuring fast FE tracking response.- Extend the UI-PMIDO theory based on LTI modelling to a linear parameter varying (LPV) model approach for FE design. A nonlinear two-link manipulator example is used to illustrate the power of this method

Kalman filters for leak diagnosis in pipelines: brief history and future research

The purpose of this paper is to provide a structural review of the progress made on the detection and localization of leaks in pipelines by using approaches based on the Kalman filter. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first review on the topic. In particular, it is the first to try to draw the attention of the leak detection community to the important contributions that use the Kalman filter as the core of a computational pipeline monitoring system. Without being exhaustive, the paper gathers the results from different research groups such that these are presented in a unified fashion. For this reason, a classification of the current approaches based on the Kalman filter is proposed. For each of the existing approaches within this classification, the basic concepts, theoretical results, and relations with the other procedures are discussed in detail. The review starts with a short summary of essential ideas about state observers. Then, a brief history of the use of the Kalman filter for diagnosing leaks is described by mentioning the most outstanding approaches. At last, brief discussions of some emerging research problems, such as the leak detection in pipelines transporting heavy oils; the main challenges; and some open issues are addressed

An unknown input observer-EFIR combined estimator for electro-hydraulic actuator in sensor fault tolerant control application

This paper presents a novel unknown input observer (UIO) integrated extended finite impulse response (EFIR) estimator (UIOEFIR) and its application for an effective sensor fault tolerant control of an electro-hydraulic-actuator (EHA). The proposed estimator exploits the UIO structure in the EFIR filter. Thus, it requires only a small number of historical data (N) whilst ensuring threefold: i) Sensor fault and system-state estimation accuracy under time-correlated noise ii) The number of estimator-design-parameters is significantly minimized. iii) Robust residual generation. A Lyapunov-stability-based theory is carried out to study its convergence condition. Next, an EHAbased test rig has been setup and sensor FTC is performed by carrying this estimator as a part of fault diagnosis algorithm to evaluate its performance by both simulation and realtime experiments. Results highlight that under optimal setting (N = Nopt), the estimator performance is near-accurate to the very-well-developed Extended Kalman Filter-based unknown input observer in an undisturbed condition but significantly outperformed while dealing with time-correlated noise under the same control environment. The estimator also shows its robustness under below-optimal setting (downgrading Nopt by 50%.) while performing in real-time sensor fault-tolerant control

Second order sliding mode observers for the ADDSAFE actuator benchmark problem

Copyright © 2014 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Control Engineering Practice. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Control Engineering Practice Vol. 31 (2014), DOI: 10.1016/j.conengprac.2013.09.014This paper presents the evaluation process and results associated with two different fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) schemes applied to two different aircraft actuator fault benchmark problems. Although the schemes are different and bespoke for the problem being addressed, both are based on the concept of a second order sliding mode. Furthermore both designs are considered as ‘local’ in the sense that a localized actuator model is used together with local sensor measurements. The schemes do not involve the global aircraft equations of motion, and therefore have low order. The first FDD scheme is associated with the detection of oscillatory failure cases (OFC), while the second scheme is aimed at the detection of actuator jams/runaways. For the OFC benchmark problem, the idea is to estimate the OFC using a mathematical model of the actuator in which the rod speed is estimated using an adaptive second order exact differentiator. For the jam/runaway actuator benchmark problem, a more classical sliding mode observer based FDD scheme is considered in which the fault reconstruction is obtained from the equivalent output error injection signals associated with a second order sliding mode structure. The results presented in this paper summarize the design process from tuning, testing and finally industrial evaluation as part of the ADDSAFE project.EU (FP7-233815

The Performance of Observer-based Residuals for Detecting Intermittent Faults: The Limitations

AbstractIn this paper a broad nonlinear system is considered. Attention is focused upon both performance of a high-gain observer-based residual and the investigation of residual effectiveness for detecting faults in actuators/components. Residual performances for different fault positions and various system complexities are compared. Both qualitative and quantitative evidence for selected fault positions indicated the performance and the effectiveness of the residuals decrease by ascending the system complexity. The poor performance of residuals in the more complex system may cause No Fault Found (NFF). The methods may be extended to the more general class of nonlinear systems and different observers. Efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated through the intermittent failure case in a vehicle suspension system

Performance assessment of hydraulic servo system based on bi-step neural network and autoregressive model

In recent years, condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of hydraulic servo systems has attracted increasing attention. However, few studies have focused on the performance assessment of these systems. This study proposes a performance assessment method based on a bi-step neural network and an autoregressive model for a hydraulic servo system; the performance is quantized by the performance confidence value (CV). First, a fault observer based on a radial basis function (RBF) neural network is designed to estimate the output of the system and calculate the residual error. Second, the corresponding adaptive threshold is generated by using another RBF neural network during system operation. Third, the difference value between the coefficients of the autoregressive model for the generated residual error and the adaptive threshold is obtained, and the Mahalanobis distance (MD) between the most recent difference (unknown conditions) and the constructed Mahalanobis space by using samples under normal conditions is calculated. Then, the condition of the system can be determined by normalizing the MD into a CV. The proposed method was further validated for three types of faults, and data were obtained using a simulation model. The experimental analysis results show that the performance of hydraulic servo systems can be assessed effectively by the proposed method