Fault diagnosis for processes with feedback control loops by shifted output sampling approach

Abstract

Data-driven fault diagnosis of closed loop processes has been a challenge in the process control community. The issue of the interaction between the process model and the controller model exists in models directly identified from closed loop data, because for all the measured process outputs, no matter whether they are normal or faulty, they are fed back into the controllers so that the reconstruction-based contribution (RBC) as the fault diagnosis method has a severe fault smearing effect. This article proposes a novel sampling scheme which can significantly eliminate the adverse effect of modeling issues in feedback control. The identifiability condition of model parameters is satisfied in the new sampling framework so that the RBC recovers its efficiency even though the process runs under feedback control. Two benchmarks, a continuous stirred-tank heater process and the Tennessee Eastman challenge problem, are used to test the efficiency of the proposed method.