A fault diagnosis prototype for a bioreactor for bioinsecticide production

The objective of this work is to develop an algorithm for fault diagnosis in a process of animal cell cultivation, for bioinsecticide production. Generally, these processes are batch processes. It is a fact that the diagnosis for a batch process involves a division of the process evolution (time horizon) into partial processes, which are defined as pseudocontinuous blocks. Therefore, a PCB represents the evolution of the system in a time interval where it has a qualitative behavior similar to a continuous one. Thus, each PCB, in which the process is divided, can be handled in a conventional way (like continuous processes). The process model, for each PCB, is a Signed Directed Graph (SDG). To achieve generality and to allow the computational implementation, the modular approach was used in the synthesis of the bioreactor digraph. After that, the SDGs were used to carry out qualitative simulations of faults. The achieved results are the fault patterns. A special fault symptom dictionary —SM—has been adopted as data base organization for fault patterns storage. An effective algorithm is presented for the searching process of fault patterns. The system studied, as a particular application, is a bioreactor for cell cultivation for bioinsecticide production. During this work, we concentrate on the SDG construction, and 3btaining real fault patterns by the elimination of spurious patterns. The algorithm has proved to be effective in both senses, resolution and accuracy, to diagnose different kinds of simulated faults.