Fault (power engineering)

Abstract: This book presents model-based analysis and design methods for fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. Architectural and structural models are used to analyse the propagation of the fault through the process, test fault detectability and reveal redundancies that can be used to ensure fault tolerance. Case studies demonstrate the methods presented. The second edition includes new material on reconfigurable control, diagnosis of nonlinear systems, and remote diagnosis, plus new examples and updated bibliography.

Abstract: Recently, research has picked up a fervent pace in the area of fault diagnosis of electrical machines. The manufacturers and users of these drives are now keen to include diagnostic features in the software to improve salability and reliability. Apart from locating specific harmonic components in the line current (popularly known as motor current signature analysis), other signals, such as speed, torque, noise, vibration etc., are also explored for their frequency contents. Sometimes, altogether different techniques, such as thermal measurements, chemical analysis, etc., are also employed to find out the nature and the degree of the fault. In addition, human involvement in the actual fault detection decision making is slowly being replaced by automated tools, such as expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy-logic-based systems; to name a few. It is indeed evident that this area is vast in scope. Hence, keeping in mind the need for future research, a review paper describing different types of faults and the signatures they generate and their diagnostics' schemes will not be entirely out of place. In particular, such a review helps to avoid repetition of past work and gives a bird's eye view to a new researcher in this area.

Abstract: One way to provide fault isolation among cooperating software modules is to place each in its own address space. However, for tightly-coupled modules, this solution incurs prohibitive context switch overhead. In this paper, we present a software approach to implementing fault isolation within a single address space.Our approach has two parts. First, we load the code and data for a distrusted module into its own fault do main, a logically separate portion of the application's address space. Second, we modify the object code of a distrusted module to prevent it from writing or jumping to an address outside its fault domain. Both these software operations are portable and programming language independent.Our approach poses a tradeoff relative to hardware fault isolation: substantially faster communication between fault domains, at a cost of slightly increased execution time for distrusted modules. We demonstrate that for frequently communicating modules, implementing fault isolation in software rather than hardware can substantially improve end-to-end application performance.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview and analysis of statistical process monitoring methods for fault detection, identification and reconstruction. Several fault detection indices in the literature are analyzed and unified. Fault reconstruction for both sensor and process faults is presented which extends the traditional missing value replacement method. Fault diagnosis methods that have appeared recently are reviewed. The reconstruction-based approach and the contribution-based approach are analyzed and compared with simulation and industrial examples. The complementary nature of the reconstruction- and contribution-based approaches is highlighted. An industrial example of polyester film process monitoring is given to demonstrate the power of the contribution- and reconstruction-based approaches in a hierarchical monitoring framework. Finally we demonstrate that the reconstruction-based framework provides a convenient way for fault analysis, including fault detectability, reconstructability and identifiability conditions, resolving many theoretical issues in process monitoring. Additional topics are summarized at the end of the paper for future investigation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.