Transient Faults Research Articles

A Fractional Steepest Ascent Morlet Wavelet Transform-Based Transient Fault Diagnosis Method for Traction Drive Control System

In this article, a fractional steepest ascent Morlet wavelet transform (FSAMWT) method with parameters optimization for transient fault (TF) diagnosis in traction drive control system (TDCS) of high-speed trains is proposed. Compared with the existing literature focusing on the TF with distinct characteristics, such as obvious amplitude changes and specific frequency components, the proposed method can deal with some TF scenarios in TDCS, which characterize with small amplitude, short duration, and energy feature pattern aliasing with noise. To be specific, the FSAMWT is first proposed. Then, a cost function of obtaining the minimum Tsallis entropy of FSAMWT is proposed to solve the parameters optimization of Morlet wavelet. Subsequently, the energy distribution of the transient kurtosis of FSAMWT coefficients is used to overcome the limitation of singular value decomposition-based methods, in which the demarcation point in singular values between the transient signals and the noise are inconspicuous. Finally, the proposed FSAMWT-based TF diagnosis method is used to diagnose six common TFs in TDCS, and the hardware-in-the-loop-based experiments and their result analysis shows the effectiveness and merits of the proposed methods.

FlexGripPlus: An improved GPGPU model to support reliability analysis

General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) have been extensively used in the last decade as accelerators in high demanding applications, such as multimedia processing and high-performance computing. Nowadays, these devices are becoming popular even in safety-critical applications, such as in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. However, these devices can suffer from the effects of transient faults, such as those produced by radiation effects. Among those effects, Single Event Upsets (SEUs), which are the focus of this paper, can cause application misbehaviors, which may lead to catastrophic consequences. In this work, we first describe how we extended the capabilities of an open-source VHDL GPGPU model (FlexGrip) and developed a new version named FlexGripPlus to study and analyze the effects of SEUs in a GPGPU in a much more detailed manner. We also performed extensive fault injection campaigns using FlexGripPlus, which allowed identifying the most critical effects within the GPGPU architecture. We finally focused on the scheduler controller since it represents a module that is specific to the GPGPU architecture and showed that it has different levels of SEU sensibility depending on the affected location. Moreover, the results of additional analyses varying the number of parallel execution units in the system are presented, demonstrating the correlation between the number of execution units in a GPGPU and the system reliability.

Lightweight approach to automated fault diagnosis in WSNs

Automated fault diagnosis in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has always been an essential field for the networks research community. In resource-related constraints, the design of a lightweight method to automatically diagnose the fault in WSN is highly beneficial. In this study, the authors propose lightweight and less-overhead approaches to diagnose hard and soft faults in WSNs automatically. Correctly, a lightweight checksum method is implemented for hard or crash fault detection. This method is capable of detecting multiple hard faults within a single path with the help of a timeout mechanism. For diagnosis of soft faults such as permanent, intermittent, and transient faults, they implement the Anderson–Darling (AD) statistical method. The AD test analyses how the sensor readings are fitted in a specific distribution for a tested significance level. Several testbed experiments are conducted to validate their hypotheses and implementations. The performance parameters that are evaluated in this work include fault detection accuracy, false alarm rate, and false-positive rate. These parameters are evaluated about various fault probabilities in the network. They observe that the proposed lightweight schemes can diagnose both hard and soft faults in message complexity over the network, which makes it adaptable in practise.

Characterizing and Exploiting Soft Error Vulnerability Phase Behavior in GPU Applications

System reliability has become a first-class design constraint. As the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) continues to increase in compute applications, including High Performance Computing (HPC) and safety-critical applications, so do the number of transient faults in GPUs. However, our understanding of the potential impact of transient fault propagation in GPU applications remains limited. This study shows that the resilience characteristics of GPU programs change significantly during program execution and these characteristics show repetitive, time-varying behavior. Interestingly, these repetitive, time-varying, resilience characteristics of GPU programs do not align or correlate well with the performance phases of GPU programs. Furthermore, this work discovers and validates that temporal changes in the vulnerability behavior during a kernel execution tends to coincide with changes in basic block execution paths. Finally, we demonstrate how these observations can be exploited to accelerate the fault injection campaigns for reliability assessment of GPU programs by an order of magnitude and open opportunities for designing other effective resilience mitigation strategies.

DRHEFT: Deadline-Constrained Reliability-Aware HEFT Algorithm for Real-Time Heterogeneous MPSoC Systems

Heterogeneous multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) are suitable platforms for real-time embedded applications that require powerful parallel processing capability as well as low power consumption. For such applications, soft-error reliability (SER) due to transient faults and lifetime reliability (LTR) due to permanent faults are both key concerns. There have been several efforts in the literature oriented toward related reliability problems. However, most existing techniques only concentrate on improving one of the two reliability metrics, which are not suitable for embedded systems deployed in critical applications in need of a long lifetime as well as a reliable execution. This article develops a novel heterogeneous earliest-finish-time (HEFT)-based algorithm to maximize SER and LTR simultaneously under the real-time constraint for dependent tasks executing on heterogeneous MPSoC systems. More specifically, a new deadline-constrained reliability-aware HEFT algorithm, namely DRHEFT, is proposed, which seeks for the best SER–LTR tradeoff solutions through using fuzzy dominance to evaluate the relative fitness values of candidate solutions. The extensive experiments on real-life benchmarks as well as synthetic applications demonstrate that DRHEFT is capable of achieving better SER–LTR tradeoff solutions with higher hypervolume and less computation cost when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

An Effective Simulation Analysis of Transient Electromagnetic Multiple Faults.

Embedded encryption devices and smart sensors are vulnerable to physical attacks. Due to the continuous shrinking of chip size, laser injection, particle radiation and electromagnetic transient injection are possible methods that introduce transient multiple faults. In the fault analysis stage, the adversary is unclear about the actual number of faults injected. Typically, the single-nibble fault analysis encounters difficulties. Therefore, in this paper, we propose novel ciphertext-only impossible differentials that can analyze the number of random faults to six nibbles. We use the impossible differentials to exclude the secret key that definitely does not exist, and then gradually obtain the unique secret key through inverse difference equations. Using software simulation, we conducted 32,000 random multiple fault attacks on Midori. The experiments were carried out to verify the theoretical model of multiple fault attacks. We obtain the relationship between fault injection and information content. To reduce the number of fault attacks, we further optimized the fault attack method. The secret key can be obtained at least 11 times. The proposed ciphertext-only impossible differential analysis provides an effective method for random multiple faults analysis, which would be helpful for improving the security of block ciphers.

Study on T-Connection Transmission Line Fault Location Method Based on Transient Fault Traveling Wave Signal

Aiming at the fault location of T-type transmission lines, which are susceptible to the influence of wave speed and transmission line length, this paper proposes a method of T-type transmission line fault location based on transient fault traveling wave information. Based on the fault reflection traveling wave generated at the fault point of the transmission line when a fault occurs, this paper detects the current and voltage traveling wave of the transmission line before and after the fault occurs through a current and voltage collector, and uses the non-stationary signal analysis to obtain the fault line The initial time of the wave reflection to the transmission line port is obtained by simplifying the formula to obtain the modal maximum value of the initial time of the transient fault traveling wave. The modal maximum value of the initial reflected traveling wave time is brought into the calculation formula of the fault branch location criterion. Finally determine the fault distance. Experimental results based on PSCAD show that the method has better accuracy and efficiency than traditional fault analysis methods.

Fast adaptive reclosing in double-circuit transmission lines for improving powersystem stability based on harmonic analysis scheme

An appropriate method is proposed for identifying permanent faults from transient faults in double-circuit transmission lines. This method could be used in adaptive single phase auto-reclosures in order to diagnose between permanent and transient faults, determine extinguishing time of the secondary arc, and calculate issuing time of reclosing commands during the occurrence of transient single phase to ground faults. The proposed method is based on harmonic analysis of the adjacent healthy circuit and could be an effective solution for blocking permanent disconnection of the power flow, improving stability, and maintaining the power network synchronism. In this paper, transient and permanent faults are simulated on a typical power system, and then current harmonics of the healthy circuit terminal are extracted and finally the proposed index for identifying the fault type is applied. In the case of transient faults, this method determines the minimum time needed for a fast successful adaptive reclosing in the network and thus prevents instability and nonsynchronism in both sides of the transmission line. Results of the various simulations run in EMTP-RV verifies accurate performance of the proposed approach.

Transient fault diagnosis for traction control system based on optimal fractional-order method

Efficient fault diagnosis of traction control system (TCS) has always been a vital technology for high speed train. Transient fault (TF) derives in harsh operation conditions and manufacturing defect, and its timely diagnosis can prevent catastrophic consequences of TCS or provide degradation information of components. However, TF is easily swallowed by background noise, especially at early stage of failure. This problem brings hardship into feature extraction. Aiming at overcoming the noise problem confronted in weak fault feature extraction, the typical TFs of traction control system are described, and feasibility of speed-based fault diagnosis is demonstrated. Then, an optimal fractional-order method is proposed for TF diagnosis, which suppresses background noise and amplifies the faulty part of the signal. Afterwards, kurtosis and fault duration time are applied to locate the fault component. Three fault diagnosis cases are investigated to validate the application of this methodology.

Evaluation of ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 metrics for transient faults of a multi-processor system-on-chip through radiation testing

Functional Safety standards for programmable electronic systems require i) the evaluation of the probability of hardware failure occurring to the electronic system due to random faults and ii) a sound estimation of the capability of the system to correct or detect the presence of dangerous faults regardless of their probability to occur. This paper presents a methodology to quantify those metrics in relation to a specific class of failures, the Single Event Effects (i.e. Transient faults in ISO 26262 terminology). The methodology is applied using accelerated radiation data measured on a System-on-Chip targeting Automotive and Industrial safety-critical applications. The results show how SPFM, PMHF, SFF, PFH metrics are being calculated. Both SPFM and SFF result to be >99% in this experiment.

Improvement of protection relay with a single phase autore-closing mechanism based on artificial neural network

This paper presents a developed logical tripping scheme to improve conventional protection performance. Adaptive single pole auto reclosure (ASPAR) system is proposed that considers, automatically tripping and reclosing of a multi-shot independent pole technique of a circuit breaker at a predetermined sequence, which can be used to boost the synchronization of the power grid under the transient fault conditions. Moreover, the ASPAR can be utilized to enhance the electrical system stability and reliability at the same operating conditions. Based on the three-phase system, the Artificial neural network (ANN) in this work has been done in order to diagnose and detect healthy and faulted phases. The proposed ANN fault classifier method consists of the logic gates, router circuits, timers, and positive and negative sequence analyses circuit. In addition, it is used to give the ability to recognize a fault type, which by training on the sequence angle values and coordination of the transmission line. Three-phase overhead transmission line including the proposed ASPAR is built in MATLA \SIMULINK environment. Thus the performance ANN-fault classified is tested under different fault conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed ASPAR based on ANN is accurate and well performance. Whereas resultant tripping and reclosing signals of ASPAR are successfully provided that enhances the circuit breaker mechanism under these operating condition.

A comprehensive analysis on the resilience of adiabatic logic families against transient faults

With the emergence of various battery operated technologies in different computing domains and the challenge of heating in such technologies, the issue of energy dissipation has become more critical than ever before. In such systems, energy constraints in one hand, and heat generation, on the other hand, necessitates the employment of energy efficient technologies in the fabrication of digital circuits. One possible solution for mitigating the energy dissipation in digital circuits is the use of adiabatic families in the process of designing computing devices. Adiabatic circuits are designed mainly based on the principles of thermodynamics and provide a paradigm shift in the design of digital systems. Nevertheless, their impact on the reliability of digital circuits due to susceptibility to soft errors has not been explored comprehensively. In this paper, we first try to survey some existing adiabatic logic families. Then we attempt to evaluate their reliability by validating their functionality under the effect of soft errors. Our evaluations which were conducted on a set of SPICE simulations have shown that amongst SCRL, 2LAL, RERL, PFAL, 2N2N2P and ECRL families the ECRL family is able to tolerate more than 90% of the injected transient faults and the applications with a high demand of reliability can use this family of adiabatic circuits. Furthermore, we will propose some suggestions for establishing reliable computations through adiabatic circuits.

Research on Simplified Model of AC/DC Hybrid Microgrid for Fault Analysis

The AC/DC hybrid microgrid, which takes into account the access requirements of AC and DC sources and loads, optimizes the structure of traditional distribution networks. The application of power electronic transformers as the core of its energy management, with electrical isolation and accurate control of the voltage, current and power flow by the control system, enables the microgrid to achieve a more flexible and stable transmission mode. Because the power electronic transformer combines the power electronic device and the high-frequency transformer, its frequent switching causes the electromagnetic transient simulation to take too long. Therefore, by simplifying control loops and converters, this paper proposes a simplified model for the microgrid system power flow and the dynamic response under exposure to a fault. The mathematical model equivalent simplification method is used in this paper. This method is concise and efficient and does not rely on the performance of a computer or change the program algorithm of the software. The simplified model was built based on PSCAD (Power System Computer Aided Design) simulation software and was carried out under short circuit fault conditions to verify its validity. The comparison of the simulation’s time consumption and accuracy shows that model simplification can significantly improve the simulation speed, with an acceptable error rate, and its dynamic response maintains good consistency with that of the detailed electromagnetic transient model. Therefore, it can be applied to the transient electromagnetic simulation fault analysis of the AC/DC hybrid microgrid.

Assessment of On-Chip Current Sensor for Detection of Thermal-Neutron-Induced Transients

This article assesses, for the first time, a body/bulk built-in current sensor (BBICS) in a CMOS 65-nm test chip under thermal neutron, high-energy neutron, and laser radiation. Experimental results suggest that the on-chip current sensor is effective to detect transient faults in different case-study subcircuits of the chip exposed to the accelerated radiation effects, opening prospects for embedding this type of sensor in reliable, secure, and low-power integrated circuit applications.

Refined Fault Detection Technique in Wireless Sensor Networks

Background/objectives: Wireless sensor network (WSN) has sensor nodes; may failure happen because of hardware failure, communication error, energy depletion, and malicious attack. So there is a need to identify the problem and take necessary action to avoid performance degradation. The main objective of this research work is to enhance the performance and improves the network life time. Methods/statistical analysis: The proposed method discusses the faulty sensor node and the type of fault that may be transient, intermittent, and permanent compares it with the other network which has the same type of faulty node. It considers both the hard fault and soft fault and also it detects the fault easily. Findings: The fault node is identified from the neighbor using nodes and when the information is received from the exterior passed to the sink. Tables in this article show that the sensor which is detected has a permanent, transient, or intermittent fault in three WSNs with a common mode of fault. Novelty: The enhanced method saves the energy sources and finds the fault that occurs in common mode failure nodes in the WSNs. Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network, Common Mode Failure (CMF), Fault Detection.

Impact of LCC–HVDC multiterminal on generator rotor angle stability

<span>Multiterminal High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission utilizing Line Commutated Converter (LCC-HVDC) technology is on the increase in interconnecting a remote generating station to any urban centre via long distance DC lines. This Multiterminal-HVDC (MTDC) system offers a reduced right of way benefits, reduction in transmission losses, as well as robust power controllability with enhanced stability margin. However, utilizing the MTDC system in an AC network bring about a new area of associated fault analysis as well as the effect on the entire AC system during a transient fault condition. This paper analyses the fault current contribution of an MTDC system during transient fault to the rotor angle of a synchronous generator. The results show a high rotor angle swing during a transient fault and the effectiveness of fast power system stabilizer connected to the generator automatic voltage regulator in damping the system oscillations. The MTDC link improved the system performance by providing an alternative path of power transfer and quick system recovery during transient fault thus increasing the rate at which the system oscillations were damped out. This shows great improvement compared to when power was being transmitted via AC lines.</span>

Research on blackout simulation model considering hidden failures and reclosing

In this paper, a blackout simulation model considering hidden failures and reclosing is proposed, which is more realistic than the previous model. The operation of reclosing devices, the synchronization control for reclosing in two-ended sources transmission lines and the interaction between reclosing and relay protection are simplified. Simulation results of IEEE39-bus test system are obtained to confirm the validity of the model. Compared with the blackout simulation model considering only the hidden failures of relay protection, it shows that the trip caused by the transient faults and hidden failures induced by transient faults can be corrected in this large-scale blackout simulation model. It also shows that with the increase of the probability of hidden failure, the failure rate of reclosing becomes an important factor affecting the system recovery.

Multi-Level Design Influences on Robustness Evaluation of 7nm FinFET Technology

Transistor arrangement influences the performance of logic cells. Complex logic cells can be used to minimize area, delay, and power. However, with the increasing relevance of nanometer challenges such as process variability and radiation effects, it is also necessary to consider these factors at logic level design. The main contribution of this work is to evaluate the advantages of adopting a multi-level logic design instead of using complex gates to mitigate process variability and radiation effects. A justification for choosing the parameter that will characterize process variability is presented. Also, the analysis with different transistor arrangements and sizing is carried out to provide a basis for a better understanding of the obtained results. The experimental evaluation considers two topologies: complex gates and multi-level using basic gates, for a set of logic gates using the 7nm FinFET technology at the layout level. As expected, at nominal conditions, the best choice is to adopt complex gate topology to optimize area, power consumption, and performance. However, the logic multi-level arrangements became the functions up to 50% less sensitive to the transient faults and at least 30% more robust to the process variability effects. A trade-off needs to be done, considering the area and power constraints.

Fault diagnosis for three-phase PWM rectifier based on deep feedforward network with transient synthetic features

Three-phase PWM rectifiers are adopted extensively in industry because of their excellent properties and potential advantages. However, while the IGBT has an open-circuit fault, the system does not crash suddenly, the performance will be reduced for instance voltages fluctuation and current harmonics. A fault diagnosis method based on deep feedforward network with transient synthetic features is proposed to reduce the dependence on the fault mathematical models in this paper, which mainly uses the transient phase current to train the deep feedforward network classifier. Firstly, the features of fault phase current are analyzed in this paper. Secondly, the historical fault data after feature synthesis is employed to train the deep feedforward network classifier, and the average fault diagnosis accuracy can reach 97.85% for transient synthetic fault data, the classifier trained by the transient synthetic features obtained more than 1% gain in performance compared with original transient features. Finally, the online fault diagnosis experiments show that the method can accurately locate the fault IGBTs, and the final diagnosis result is determined by multiple groups results, which has the ability to increase the accuracy and reliability of the diagnosis results.

Efficient static corrective control for model matching and fault tolerance of asynchronous sequential machines

This paper addresses a static corrective control scheme for input/state asynchronous sequential machines (ASMs) with transient faults. While the previous static controllers have tight existence conditions and achieve only model matching, such restraints are relaxed in this study. To this end, a diagnoser identifying model mismatches and transient faults is introduced to facilitate the design of the static controller. Also state bursts, or fast outbursts of state characters generated by the controlled machine during transitions, are used as feedback. In association with the diangoser, we present the existence condition and design algorithm for the static corrective controller that matches the stable-state behavior of the closed-loop system to that of a reference model while invalidating the adverse effect of transient faults. A case study is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed control methodology.