Fault propagation timing analysis to aid in the selection of sensors fro health management systems

Sensor data is processed to assess performance and health of complex systems. Proper sensor selection, placement, and implementation are critical to build an effective health management system. For complex systems in which the timely assessment of the health is desired to avoid expensive consequences of failure, sensor placement is vital. The ability to identify a critical failure early is completely dependent on sensor location within the fault propagation path. A strategy for assessing a sensor suite with respect to timely critical failure detection is presented in this thesis. To illustrate the strategy, Fault Propagation Timing Analysis (FPTA) will be performed on the Rocketdyne RS-68 rocket engine --Abstract, page iii

Sensor Selection and Optimization for Health Assessment of Aerospace Systems

Aerospace systems are developed similarly to other large-scale systems through a series of reviews, where designs are modified as system requirements are refined. For space-based systems few are built and placed into service. These research vehicles have limited historical experience to draw from and formidable reliability and safety requirements, due to the remote and severe environment of space. Aeronautical systems have similar reliability and safety requirements, and while these systems may have historical information to access, commercial and military systems require longevity under a range of operational conditions and applied loads. Historically, the design of aerospace systems, particularly the selection of sensors, is based on the requirements for control and performance rather than on health assessment needs. Furthermore, the safety and reliability requirements are met through sensor suite augmentation in an ad hoc, heuristic manner, rather than any systematic approach. A review of the current sensor selection practice within and outside of the aerospace community was conducted and a sensor selection architecture is proposed that will provide a justifiable, dependable sensor suite to address system health assessment requirements

Dynamic Modeling, Sensor Placement Design, and Fault Diagnosis of Nuclear Desalination Systems

Fault diagnosis of sensors, devices, and equipment is an important topic in the nuclear industry for effective and continuous operation of nuclear power plants. All the fault diagnostic approaches depend critically on the sensors that measure important process variables. Whenever a process encounters a fault, the effect of the fault is propagated to some or all the process variables. The ability of the sensor network to detect and isolate failure modes and anomalous conditions is crucial for the effectiveness of a fault detection and isolation (FDI) system. However, the emphasis of most fault diagnostic approaches found in the literature is primarily on the procedures for performing FDI using a given set of sensors. Little attention has been given to actual sensor allocation for achieving the efficient FDI performance. This dissertation presents a graph-based approach that serves as a solution for the optimization of sensor placement to ensure the observability of faults, as well as the fault resolution to a maximum possible extent. This would potentially facilitate an automated sensor allocation procedure. Principal component analysis (PCA), a multivariate data-driven technique, is used to capture the relationships in the data, and to fit a hyper-plane to the data. The fault directions for different fault scenarios are obtained from the prediction errors, and fault isolation is then accomplished using new projections on these fault directions. The effectiveness of the use of an optimal sensor set versus a reduced set for fault detection and isolation is demonstrated using this technique. Among a variety of desalination technologies, the multi-stage flash (MSF) processes contribute substantially to the desalinating capacity in the world. In this dissertation, both steady-state and dynamic simulation models of a MSF desalination plant are developed. The dynamic MSF model is coupled with a previously developed International Reactor Innovative and Secure (IRIS) model in the SIMULINK environment. The developed sensor placement design and fault diagnostic methods are illustrated with application to the coupled nuclear desalination system. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly developed integrated approach to performance monitoring and fault diagnosis with optimized sensor placement for large industrial systems

Contribution au diagnostic de pannes pour\ud les systèmes différentiellement plats

Cette thèse s’intéresse au diagnostic de pannes dans les systèmes différentiellement plats, ceci constituant une large classe de systèmes non linéaires. La propriété de platitude différentielle est caractérisée par des relations qui permettent d’exprimer les états d’un système et ses entrées en fonction de ses sorties plates et de leurs dérivées. Ces relations qui sont à la base de la commande plate sont aussi utiles pour la réalisation du diagnostic de pannes. Ainsi sont introduites les notions de minimalité pour les sorties plates, de platitude stricte et de degré additionnel de redondance. Ceci conduit à la proposition d’une méthode globale de détection de pannes basée sur la platitude. Partant alors de la constatation que les systèmes différentiellement plats de complexité élevée sont souvent constituer de sous systèmes eux mêmes différentiellement plats, l’approche de détection de pannes précédente peut être démultipliée au sein de cette structure de façon à en identifier les sous systèmes défaillants. On s’intéresse alors au cas courant de la platitude différentielle implicite et on montre dans le cadre d’une application aéronautique comment les réseaux de neurones permettent de constituer une solution numérique au problème de détection de pannes. La disponibilité en temps réel de dérivées successives des sorties étant essentielle pour la mise en oeuvre de ces méthodes, on étudie alors les performances d’un filtre dérivateur alors que le système est lui-même soumis à une commande plate, ceci conduira a modifié légèrement une telle loi de commande afin d’effectuer l’effet des erreurs d’estimation. On s’intéresse finalement à la détection des pannes dans les systèmes chaotiques différentiellement plats. On montre sur plusieurs exemples comment la propriété de platitude peut être mise à profit pour détecter et identifier des variations paramétriques au sein d’un tel type de système chaotique. Des résultats de simulation sont présentés. Finalement des thèmes de recherche complémentaires à cette approche sont relevés. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This thesis is devoted to the diagnostic of faults in differentially flat systems, where\ud differentially flat systems constitute a rather large class of non linear systems. The flatness\ud property is characterized by relations allowing to express states and input as functions of the\ud outputs and their derivatives up to a finite order. These relations are the basis for the synthesis\ud of flat control laws and are, is it displayed here, useful to perform an efficient diagnostic of\ud additional redundancy degree. Then a global fault detection method based on the flatness\ud property is proposed. It is shown that many differentially flat subsystems so that the proposed\ud fault detection method can be applied within the corresponding structure allowing then the\ud identification of faulty subsystems. Then the frequent case of implicitly differentially flat\ud systems is considered and it is shown through an aeronautical application that neural networks\ud can provide a numerical solution approach to this fault detection problem. Since with this\ud approach the one line availability of successive derivatives of the outputs is imperative, the\ud performance of a derivative filter is studied. To eliminate the effect of the resulting estimation\ud errors, some improvements are introduced to the current flat control law. In the last section of\ud the report the diagnostic of differentially flat chaotic systems is considered. In different cases it is shown how the differential flatness property can be used to detect and identify variations of the parameters of the chaotic system. Simulation results are displayed. Finally some complementary fields of research are pointed out\u

Optimal Sensor Allocation for Fault Detection and Isolation

Automatic fault diagnostic schemes rely on various types of sensors (e.g., temperature, pressure, vibration, etc) to measure the system parameters. Efficacy of a diagnostic scheme is largely dependent on the amount and quality of information available from these sensors. The reliability of sensors, as well as the weight, volume, power, and cost constraints, often makes it impractical to monitor a large number of system parameters. An optimized sensor allocation that maximizes the fault diagnosibility, subject to specified weight, volume, power, and cost constraints is required. Use of optimal sensor allocation strategies during the design phase can ensure better diagnostics at a reduced cost for a system incorporating a high degree of built-in testing. In this paper, we propose an approach that employs multiple fault diagnosis (MFD) and optimization techniques for optimal sensor placement for fault detection and isolation (FDI) in complex systems. Keywords: sensor allocation, multiple fault diagnosis, Lagrangian relaxation, approximate belief revision, multidimensional knapsack problem