Real Time Fault Diagnosis for a Heat Exchanger - A Model Based Approach

Components, sensors and actuators are often subjected to unexpected and unpermitted deviations, so called faults, from the acceptable or usual conditions. In order to avoid the possible loss of system overall performance, which may lead to unacceptable economic loss, it is necessary to detect and isolate such faults from the process. The model-based method is used for the detection of fault in the heat exchanger process. The faults are identified based on the generation of residuals. Residuals are generated based on the comparison between the plant and estimated model of the process. If the residual has any non-zero value that indicates the presence of fault, otherwise it is fault free condition. In the present work, the faults such as actuator, sensor and process faults are applied to the real time heat exchanger process and the residual is extracted through that the faults are isolated.