Fault detection, identification and accommodation techniques for unmanned airborne vehicles

Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAV) are assuming prominent roles in both the commercial and military aerospace industries. The promise of reduced costs and reduced risk to human life is one of their major attractions, however these low-cost systems are yet to gain acceptance as a safe alternate to manned solutions. The absence of a thinking, observing, reacting and decision making pilot reduces the UAVs capability of managing adverse situations such as faults and failures. This paper presents a review of techniques that can be used to track the system health onboard a UAV. The review is based on a year long literature review aimed at identifying approaches suitable for combating the low reliability and high attrition rates of today’s UAV. This research primarily focuses on real-time, onboard implementations for generating accurate estimations of aircraft health for fault accommodation and mission management (change of mission objectives due to deterioration in aircraft health). The major task of such systems is the process of detection, identification and accommodation of faults and failures (FDIA). A number of approaches exist, of which model-based techniques show particular promise. Model-based approaches use analytical redundancy to generate residuals for the aircraft parameters that can be used to indicate the occurrence of a fault or failure. Actions such as switching between redundant components or modifying control laws can then be taken to accommodate the fault. The paper further describes recent work in evaluating neural-network approaches to sensor failure detection and identification (SFDI). The results of simulations with a variety of sensor failures, based on a Matlab non-linear aircraft model are presented and discussed. Suggestions for improvements are made based on the limitations of this neural network approach with the aim of including a broader range of failures, while still maintaining an accurate model in the presence of these failures

Data-driven Soft Sensors in the Process Industry

In the last two decades Soft Sensors established themselves as a valuable alternative to the traditional means for the acquisition of critical process variables, process monitoring and other tasks which are related to process control. This paper discusses characteristics of the process industry data which are critical for the development of data-driven Soft Sensors. These characteristics are common to a large number of process industry fields, like the chemical industry, bioprocess industry, steel industry, etc. The focus of this work is put on the data-driven Soft Sensors because of their growing popularity, already demonstrated usefulness and huge, though yet not completely realised, potential. A comprehensive selection of case studies covering the three most important Soft Sensor application fields, a general introduction to the most popular Soft Sensor modelling techniques as well as a discussion of some open issues in the Soft Sensor development and maintenance and their possible solutions are the main contributions of this work

A Literature Review of Fault Diagnosis Based on Ensemble Learning

The accuracy of fault diagnosis is an important indicator to ensure the reliability of key equipment systems. Ensemble learning integrates different weak learning methods to obtain stronger learning and has achieved remarkable results in the field of fault diagnosis. This paper reviews the recent research on ensemble learning from both technical and field application perspectives. The paper summarizes 87 journals in recent web of science and other academic resources, with a total of 209 papers. It summarizes 78 different ensemble learning based fault diagnosis methods, involving 18 public datasets and more than 20 different equipment systems. In detail, the paper summarizes the accuracy rates, fault classification types, fault datasets, used data signals, learners (traditional machine learning or deep learning-based learners), ensemble learning methods (bagging, boosting, stacking and other ensemble models) of these fault diagnosis models. The paper uses accuracy of fault diagnosis as the main evaluation metrics supplemented by generalization and imbalanced data processing ability to evaluate the performance of those ensemble learning methods. The discussion and evaluation of these methods lead to valuable research references in identifying and developing appropriate intelligent fault diagnosis models for various equipment. This paper also discusses and explores the technical challenges, lessons learned from the review and future development directions in the field of ensemble learning based fault diagnosis and intelligent maintenance

Machine learning and deep learning based methods toward Industry 4.0 predictive maintenance in induction motors: Α state of the art survey

Purpose: Developments in Industry 4.0 technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled data-driven manufacturing. Predictive maintenance (PdM) has therefore become the prominent approach for fault detection and diagnosis (FD/D) of induction motors (IMs). The maintenance and early FD/D of IMs are critical processes, considering that they constitute the main power source in the industrial production environment. Machine learning (ML) methods have enhanced the performance and reliability of PdM. Various deep learning (DL) based FD/D methods have emerged in recent years, providing automatic feature engineering and learning and thereby alleviating drawbacks of traditional ML based methods. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of ML and DL based FD/D methods of IMs that have emerged since 2015. An overview of the main DL architectures used for this purpose is also presented. A discussion of the recent trends is given as well as future directions for research. Design/methodology/approach: A comprehensive survey has been carried out through all available publication databases using related keywords. Classification of the reviewed works has been done according to the main ML and DL techniques and algorithms Findings: DL based PdM methods have been mainly introduced and implemented for IM fault diagnosis in recent years. Novel DL FD/D methods are based on single DL techniques as well as hybrid techniques. DL methods have also been used for signal preprocessing and moreover, have been combined with traditional ML algorithms to enhance the FD/D performance in feature engineering. Publicly available datasets have been mostly used to test the performance of the developed methods, however industrial datasets should become available as well. Multi-agent system (MAS) based PdM employing ML classifiers has been explored. Several methods have investigated multiple IM faults, however, the presence of multiple faults occurring simultaneously has rarely been investigated. Originality/value: The paper presents a comprehensive review of the recent advances in PdM of IMs based on ML and DL methods that have emerged since 2015Peer Reviewe

Methods and Systems for Fault Diagnosis in Nuclear Power Plants

This research mainly deals with fault diagnosis in nuclear power plants (NPP), based on a framework that integrates contributions from fault scope identification, optimal sensor placement, sensor validation, equipment condition monitoring, and diagnostic reasoning based on pattern analysis. The research has a particular focus on applications where data collected from the existing SCADA (supervisory, control, and data acquisition) system is not sufficient for the fault diagnosis system. Specifically, the following methods and systems are developed. A sensor placement model is developed to guide optimal placement of sensors in NPPs. The model includes 1) a method to extract a quantitative fault-sensor incidence matrix for a system; 2) a fault diagnosability criterion based on the degree of singularities of the incidence matrix; and 3) procedures to place additional sensors to meet the diagnosability criterion. Usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a nuclear power plant process control test facility (NPCTF). Experimental results show that three pairs of undiagnosable faults can be effectively distinguished with three additional sensors selected by the proposed model. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is designed and a prototype is implemented on the NPCTF. WSN is an effective tool to collect data for fault diagnosis, especially for systems where additional measurements are needed. The WSN has distributed data processing and information fusion for fault diagnosis. Experimental results on the NPCTF show that the WSN system can be used to diagnose all six fault scenarios considered for the system. A fault diagnosis method based on semi-supervised pattern classification is developed which requires significantly fewer training data than is typically required in existing fault diagnosis models. It is a promising tool for applications in NPPs, where it is usually difficult to obtain training data under fault conditions for a conventional fault diagnosis model. The proposed method has successfully diagnosed nine types of faults physically simulated on the NPCTF. For equipment condition monitoring, a modified S-transform (MST) algorithm is developed by using shaping functions, particularly sigmoid functions, to modify the window width of the existing standard S-transform. The MST can achieve superior time-frequency resolution for applications that involves non-stationary multi-modal signals, where classical methods may fail. Effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using a vibration test system as well as applications to detect a collapsed pipe support in the NPCTF. The experimental results show that by observing changes in time-frequency characteristics of vibration signals, one can effectively detect faults occurred in components of an industrial system. To ensure that a fault diagnosis system does not suffer from erroneous data, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) method based on kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is extended for sensor validations, where sensor faults are detected and isolated from the reconstruction errors of a KPCA model. The method is validated using measurement data from a physical NPP. The NPCTF is designed and constructed in this research for experimental validations of fault diagnosis methods and systems. Faults can be physically simulated on the NPCTF. In addition, the NPCTF is designed to support systems based on different instrumentation and control technologies such as WSN and distributed control systems. The NPCTF has been successfully utilized to validate the algorithms and WSN system developed in this research. In a real world application, it is seldom the case that one single fault diagnostic scheme can meet all the requirements of a fault diagnostic system in a nuclear power. In fact, the values and performance of the diagnosis system can potentially be enhanced if some of the methods developed in this thesis can be integrated into a suite of diagnostic tools. In such an integrated system, WSN nodes can be used to collect additional data deemed necessary by sensor placement models. These data can be integrated with those from existing SCADA systems for more comprehensive fault diagnosis. An online performance monitoring system monitors the conditions of the equipment and provides key information for the tasks of condition-based maintenance. When a fault is detected, the measured data are subsequently acquired and analyzed by pattern classification models to identify the nature of the fault. By analyzing the symptoms of the fault, root causes of the fault can eventually be identified