Academic literature on the topic '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.

Fault detection and diagnosis have gained central importance in the chemical process industries over the past decade. This is due to several reasons, one of them being that copious amount of data is available from a large number of sensors in process plants. Moreover, since industrial processes operate in closed loop with appropriate output feedback to attain certain performance objectives, instrument faults have a direct effect on the overall performance of the automation system. Extracting essential information about the state of the system and processing the measurements for detecting, discriminating, and identifying abnormal readings are important tasks of a fault diagnosis system. The goal of this dissertation is to develop such fault diagnosis systems, which use limited information about the process model to robustly detect, discriminate, and reconstruct instrumentation faults. Broadly, the proposed method consists of a novel nonlinear state and parameter estimator coupled with a fault detection, discrimination, and reconstruction system. The first part of this dissertation focuses on designing fault diagnosis systems that not only perform fault detection and isolation but also estimate the shape and size of the unknown instrument faults. This notion is extended to nonlinear processes whose structure is known but the parameters of the process are a priori uncertain and bounded. Since the uncertainty in the process model and instrument fault detection interact with each other, a novel two-time scale procedure is adopted to render overall fault diagnosis. Further, some techniques to enhance the convergence properties of the proposed state and parameter estimator are presented. The remaining part of the dissertation extends the proposed model-based fault diagnosis methodology to processes for which first principles modeling is either expensive or infeasible. This is achieved by using an empirical model identification technique called subspace identification for state-space characterization of the process. Finally the proposed methodology for fault diagnosis has been applied in numerical simulations to a non-isothermal CSTR (continuous stirred tank reactor), an industrial melter process, and a debutanizer plant.

This investigation focuses and analyses the theoretical and practical performance of a dynamic system, which affords condition monitoring and robust fault diagnosis. The importance of robustness in fault diagnosis is becoming significant for controlled dynamic systems in order to improve operating reliability, critical-safety and reducing the cost often caused by interruption shut down and component repairing. There is a strong motivation to develop an effective real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis strategy so as to ensure a timely response by supervisory personnel to false alarms and damage control due to faults/malfunctions. Environmental disturbances/noises are unavoidable in practical engineering systems, the effects of which usually reduce the diagnostic ability of conventional fault diagnosis algorithms, and even cause false alarms. As a result, robust fault diagnosis is vital for practical application in control systems, which aims to maximize the fault detectability and minimize the effects of environment disturbances/noises. In this study, a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization model-based fault diagnosis algorithm is investigated for applications in wind turbine energy systems and induction motors through concerns for typical types of developing (incipient) and sudden (abrupt) faults. A robust fault detection approach is utilized by seeking an optimal observer gain when GA optimisation problems become solvable so that the residual is sensitive to the faults, but robust against environmental disturbances/noises. Also, robust fault estimation techniques are proposed by integrating augmented observer and GA optimisation techniques so that the estimation error dynamics have a good robustness against environmental disturbances/noises. The two case studies investigated in this project are: a 5MW wind turbine model where robust fault detection and robust fault estimation are discussed with details; and a 2kW induction motor experimental setup is investigated, where robust fault detection and robust fault estimation are both examined, and modelling errors are effectively attenuated by using the proposed algorithms. The simulations and experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis methods.

Because of the increasingly demanding tasks that robotic systems are asked to perform, there is a need to make them more reliable, intelligent, versatile and self-sufficient. Furthermore, throughout the robotic system?s operation, changes in its internal and external environments arise, which can distort trajectory tracking, slow down its performance, decrease its capabilities, and even bring it to a total halt. Changes in robotic systems are inevitable. They have diverse characteristics, magnitudes and origins, from the all-familiar viscous friction to Coulomb/Sticktion friction, and from structural vibrations to air/underwater environmental change. This thesis presents an on-line environmental Change, Detection, Isolation and Accommodation (CDIA) scheme that provides a robotic system the capabilities to achieve demanding requirements and manage the ever-emerging changes. The CDIA scheme is structured around a priori known dynamic models of the robotic system and the changes (faults). In this approach, the system monitors its internal and external environments, detects any changes, identifies and learns them, and makes necessary corrections into its behavior in order to minimize or counteract their effects. A comprehensive study is presented that deals with every stage, aspect, and variation of the CDIA process. One of the novelties of the proposed approach is that the profile of the change may be either time or state-dependent. The contribution of the CDIA scheme is twofold as it provides robustness with respect to unmodeled dynamics and with respect to torque-dependent, state-dependent, structural and external environment changes. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by the development of the CDIA scheme for a SCARA robot. Results of this extensive numerical study are included to verify the applicability of the proposed scheme.

This dissertation intends to provide theoretical and practical contributions on estimation, diagnosis and control of complex systems, especially in the mathematical form of descriptor systems. The research is motivated by real applications, such as water networks and power systems, which require a control system to provide a proper management able to take into account their specific features and operating limits in presence of uncertainties related to their operation and failures from component malfunctions. Such a control system is expected to provide an optimal operation to obtain efficient and reliable performance. State estimation is an essential tool, which can be used not only for fault diagnosis but also for the controller design. To achieve a satisfactory robust performance, set theory is chosen to build a general framework for descriptor systems subject to uncertainties. Under certain assumptions, these uncertainties are propagated and bounded by deterministic sets that can be explicitly characterized at each iteration step. Moreover, set-invariance characterizations for descriptor systems are also of interest to describe the steady performance, which can also be used for active mode detection. For the controller design for complex systems, new developments of economic model predictive control (EMPC) are studied taking into account the case of underlying periodic behaviors. The EMPC controller is designed to be recursively feasible even with sudden changes in the economic cost function and the closed-loop convergence is guaranteed. Besides, a robust technique is plugged into the EMPC controller design to maintain these closed-loop properties in presence of uncertainties. Engineering applications modeled as descriptor systems are presented to illustrate these control strategies. From the real applications, some additional difficulties are solved, such as using a two-layer control strategy to avoid binary variables in real-time optimizations and using nonlinear constraint relaxation to deal with nonlinear algebraic equations in the descriptor model. Furthermore, the fault-tolerant capability is also included in the controller design for descriptor systems by means of the designed virtual actuator and virtual sensor together with an observer-based delayed controller.<br>Esta tesis propone contribuciones de carácter teórico y aplicado para la estimación del estado, el diagnóstico y el control óptimo de sistemas dinámicos complejos en particular, para los sistemas descriptores, incluyendo la capacidad de tolerancia a fallos. La motivación de la tesis proviene de aplicaciones reales, como redes de agua y sistemas de energía, cuya naturaleza crítica requiere necesariamente un sistema de control para una gestión capaz de tener en cuenta sus características específicas y límites operativos en presencia de incertidumbres relacionadas con su funcionamiento, así como fallos de funcionamiento de los componentes. El objetivo es conseguir controladores que mejoren tanto la eficiencia como la fiabilidad de dichos sistemas. La estimación del estado es una herramienta esencial que puede usarse no solo para el diagnóstico de fallos sino también para el diseño del control. Con este fin, se ha decidido utilizar metodologías intervalares, o basadas en conjuntos, para construir un marco general para los sistemas de descriptores sujetos a incertidumbres desconocidas pero acotadas. Estas incertidumbres se propagan y delimitan mediante conjuntos que se pueden caracterizar explícitamente en cada instante. Por otra parte, también se proponen caracterizaciones basadas en conjuntos invariantes para sistemas de descriptores que permiten describir comportamientos estacionarios y resultan útiles para la detección de modos activos. Se estudian también nuevos desarrollos del control predictivo económico basado en modelos (EMPC) para tener en cuenta posibles comportamientos periódicos en la variación de parámetros o en las perturbaciones que afectan a estos sistemas. Además, se demuestra que el control EMPC propuesto garantiza la factibilidad recursiva, incluso frente a cambios repentinos en la función de coste económico y se garantiza la convergencia en lazo cerrado. Por otra parte, se utilizan técnicas de control robusto pata garantizar que las estrategias de control predictivo económico mantengan las prestaciones en lazo cerrado, incluso en presencia de incertidumbre. Los desarrollos de la tesis se ilustran con casos de estudio realistas. Para algunas de aplicaciones reales, se resuelven dificultades adicionales, como el uso de una estrategia de control de dos niveles para evitar incluir variables binarias en la optimización y el uso de la relajación de restricciones no lineales para tratar las ecuaciones algebraicas no lineales en el modelo descriptor en las redes de agua. Finalmente, se incluye también una contribución al diseño de estrategias de control con tolerancia a fallos para sistemas descriptores.