Fault diagnosis for the vertical three-tank system via high-order sliding-mode observation

This paper presents an approach to the fault diagnosis and disturbance observation for the hydraulic vertical three-tank system. An observer is designed which contains a corrective term based on a second-order sliding mode control algorithm featuring global convergence properties. Thanks to the proposed global observer, the reconstruction of certain faults and/or disturbances can be performed directly from the continuous observer output injection signal, without requiring any filtration. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by means of a simulation example and is then validated by performing real experiments.