Development of a Fault Tolerant Actuation System- Modelling and Validation

Abstract

It is generally accepted that incorporating so-called ‘smart’ control and monitoring technologies can improve the reliability and availability of industrial systems. ‘Smart’ control can be defined as making full use of all the measured, inferred and a priori information that is available from a system. In general terms, the idea is that system level knowledge can be developed and used to check sensors for problems, to detect and identify faults as they develop and, where appropriate, to re-configure the controller(s) to accommodate plant or sensor faults until repair can be effected. To-date success, in terms of real industrial applications of the more advanced techniques, has been limited. Hence, demonstrators are needed. The work described in this paper is part of an on going project aimed at demonstrating these “smart” concepts on a Stewart-Gough platform comprising six pneumatic actuators. To-date the research has focussed on specifying the demonstrator system and developing and validating models of the pneumatic system. This is probably the most important step in designing a fault tolerant actuation system – as the model is the foundation of the other algorithms