Study on CLIPS-based real-time fault diagnosis system used in power plant

Information of faults in power plant is too much and very complex, mostly, it is difficult to deal with effectively when a breakdown takes place. In response to this situation, a method of designing a real-time fault diagnosis system based on CLIPS is presented in this paper. It takes full advantage of CLIPS, VC++ and SQL SERVER database to construct an expert system solving the diagnosis problem. CLIPS was used to edit the knowledge base and served as inference engine. Data acquisition, data exchanging within the system and interface of the system were programmed with VC++ and OPC. Dynamic process data, information of faults and so on were stored in SQL SERVER. The system was tested by a power plant simulation system based on virtual DCS. The result shows that it is able to watch and diagnose the real-time faults of boiler and steam turbine system of power plant correctly and quickly.