Fault Isolation of a Class of Uncertain Nonlinear Parabolic PDE Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel fault isolation (FI) scheme for distributed parameter systems modeled by a class of parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) with nonlinear uncertain dynamics. A key feature of the proposed FI scheme is its capability of dealing with the effects of system uncertainties for accurate FI. Specifically, an approximate ordinary differential equation (ODE) system is first derived to capture the dominant dynamics of the original PDE system. An adaptive dynamics identification approach using radial basis function neural network is then proposed based on this ODE system, to achieve locally-accurate identification of the uncertain system dynamics under faulty modes. A bank of FI estimators with associated adaptive thresholds are finally designed for real-time FI decision making. Rigorous analysis on the fault isolatability is provided. Simulation study on a representative transport-reaction process is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.