Sensor bias fault isolation in a class of nonlinear systems

This note presents a robust fault isolation scheme for a class of nonlinear systems with sensor bias type of faults. The proposed fault diagnosis architecture consists of a fault detection estimator and a bank of isolation estimators, each corresponding to a particular output sensor. Based on the class of nonlinear systems and sensor bias faults under consideration, the stability and learning properties of the fault isolation estimators are obtained, adaptive thresholds are derived for the isolation estimators, and fault isolability conditions are rigorously investigated, characterizing the class of nonlinear faults that are isolable by the proposed scheme. A simulation example is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the sensor bias fault isolation methodology.