An integrated approach to fault diagnosis for a class of chemical batch processes

This paper deals with the problem of fault diagnosis for a class of chemical reactions taking place in a jacketed batch reactor. An integrated diagnosis scheme, using redundant temperature measurements and a bank of state observers, is adopted to detect, isolate and identify faults. A unified framework is developed to take into account faults affecting sensors, actuators and process. Redundant sensor measurements, together with the estimates provided by two isolation observers, are processed by a Decision Making System, providing information about the faulty sensor as well as healthy measurements. Then, healthy measurements are processed by a bank of adaptive observers, aimed at detecting, isolating and identifying actuator and process faults. In order to test the effectiveness of the approach, a detailed simulation case study is developed.