Improved PCA method for sensor fault detection and isolation in a nuclear power plant

Abstract

Abstract An improved principal component analysis (PCA) method is applied for sensor fault detection and isolation (FDI) in a nuclear power plant (NPP) in this paper. Data pre-processing and false alarm reducing methods are combined with general PCA method to improve the model performance in practice. In data pre-processing, singular points and random fluctuations in the original data are eliminated with various techniques respectively. In fault detecting, a statistics-based method is proposed to reduce the false alarms of T2 and Q statistics. Finally, the effects of the proposed data pre-processing and false alarm reducing techniques are evaluated with sensor measurements from a real NPP. They are proved to be greatly beneficial to the improvement on the reliability and stability of PCA model. Meanwhile various sensor faults are imposed to normal measurements to test the FDI ability of the PCA model. Simulation results show that the proposed PCA model presents favorable performance on the FDI of sensors no matter with major or small failures.