Coal-Shortage Detection in Power Plants by Means of a Fixed Size Sample Strategy *

An application of a fixed-size sample (FSS) hypothesis testing algorithm to the problem of detecting shortages in the coal supply subsystems of thermal power plants is presented. Blockage of coal supply leads to the occurrence of possibly hazardous operating conditions; it is therefore treated as a fault, and its detection is posed as a fault detection and isolation (FDI) problem. Physical variables of interest are treated as stochastic processes, and the fault modeled as a change in their mean values. Application of the chosen change detection strategy to data taken from a real process is discussed in detail, and the performance of the algorithm is experimentally verified.