Fault diagnosis and accommodation of a three-tank system based on analytical redundancy

This paper investigates the application of a fault diagnosis and accommodation method to a real system composed of three tanks. The performance of a closed-loop system can be altered by the occurrence of faults which can, in some circumstances, cause serious damage on the system. The research goal is to prevent the system deterioration by developing a controller that has some capabilities to compensate for faults, that is, the fault accommodation or fault-tolerant control. In this paper, a two-step scheme composed of a fault detection, isolation and estimation module, and a control compensation module is presented. The main contribution is to develop a unique structured residual generator able to isolate and estimate both sensor and actuator faults. This estimation is of paramount importance to compensate for these faults and to preserve the system performances. The application of this method to the three-tank system gives encouraging results which are presented and commented on in case of various kinds of faults.