Sensors and actuator fault tolerant control applied in a double pipe heat exchanger

In this work, we present the design of a Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) system, applied in the outlet temperature sensors and in the control valve (actuator) of a concentric double pipe counter-current flow heat exchanger. The FTC consists in a sensors Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) system and an actuator FDI system. The sensors FDI system is based on analytical redundancy, in such a way that a bank of modified Kalman filters is developed in order to estimate the two outlet temperatures of the heat exchanger. To develop the modified Kalman filters a multi-linear models approach is used. So that, if a sensor fault is detected by the FDI system the measured temperature signal is replaced by the temperature estimation provided by the modified Kalman filter. Moreover, to detect an actuator fault a comparison between the control valve behaviors (the control valve voltage is used to estimate the water flow rate) and a predefined flow rate for each linear model is carried out. In order to keep the continuous operation of the heat exchanger even in fault presence a model-following control law is introduced, such that, when an actuator fault occurs, the FDI system detect the fault and immediately the model-following control makes the fault accommodation in order to compensate the actuator fault. The proposed scheme is presented with experimental data on-line. The successful tests are presented and discussed.