<p>When flying a fighter aircraft such as the JAS 39 Gripen, the pilot is exposed to high g-loads. In order to prevent the draining of blood from the brain during this stress an anti-g protection system is used. The system consists of a pair of trousers, called the anti-g trousers, with inflatable bladders. The bladders are filled with air, pressing tightly on to the legs in order to prevent the blood from leaving the upper part of the body.</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to detect if the pressure of the anti-g trousers is deviating from the desired value. This is done by developing a detection algorithm which gives two kinds of alarm. One is given during minor deviations using a CUSUM test, and one is given at grave deviations, based on different conditions including residual, derivative and time. The thresholds, in which between the pressure should lie in a faultless system, are calculated from the g-load value. The thresholds are based upon given static guidelines for the pressure tolerance area and are modified in order to adapt to the estimated dynamics of the system.</p><p>The values of the input signals, pressure and g-load, were taken from real flight sessions. The validation has been performed using both faultless and faulty flight sequences, with low false alarm rate and no missed detections. All together the detection system is considered to work well.</p>

In this dissertation, we study two new approaches to fault detection for autonomous robots. The first approach involves the synthesis of software components that give a robot the capacity to detect faults which occur in itself. Our hypothesis is that hardware faults change the flow of sensory data and the actions performed by the control program. By detecting these changes, the presence of faults can be inferred. In order to test our hypothesis, we collect data in three different tasks performed by real robots. During a number of training runs, we record sensory data from the robots both while they are operating normally and after a fault has been injected. We use back-propagation neural networks to synthesize fault detection components based on the data collected in the training runs. We evaluate the performance of the trained fault detectors in terms of the number of false positives and the time it takes to detect a fault. The results show that good fault detectors can be obtained. We extend the set of possible faults and go on to show that a single fault detector can be trained to detect several faults in both a robot's sensors and actuators. We show that fault detectors can be synthesized that are robust to variations in the task. Finally, we show how a fault detector can be trained to allow one robot to detect faults that occur in another robot. The second approach involves the use of firefly-inspired synchronization to allow the presence of faulty robots to be determined by other non-faulty robots in a swarm robotic system. We take inspiration from the synchronized flashing behavior observed in some species of fireflies. Each robot flashes by lighting up its on-board red LEDs and neighboring robots are driven to flash in synchrony. The robots always interpret the absence of flashing by a particular robot as an indication that the robot has a fault. A faulty robot can stop flashing periodically for one of two reasons. The fault itself can render the robot unable to flash periodically. Alternatively, the faulty robot might be able to detect the fault itself using endogenous fault detection and decide to stop flashing. Thus, catastrophic faults in a robot can be directly detected by its peers, while the presence of less serious faults can be detected by the faulty robot itself, and actively communicated to neighboring robots. We explore the performance of the proposed algorithm both on a real world swarm robotic system and in simulation. We show that failed robots are detected correctly and in a timely manner, and we show that a system composed of robots with simulated self-repair capabilities can survive relatively high failure rates. We conclude that i) fault injection and learning can give robots the capacity to detect faults that occur in themselves, and that ii) firefly-inspired synchronization can enable robots in a swarm robotic system to detect and communicate faults.

The development of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis systems for wind turbines has received considerable attention in recent years. With wind playing an increasing part in Canada’s electricity demand from renewable resources, installations of new wind turbines are experiencing significant growth in the region. Hence, there is a need for efficient condition monitoring and fault diagnosis systems for wind turbines. Gearbox, as one of the highest risk elements in wind turbines, is responsible for smooth operation of wind turbines. Moreover, the availability of the whole system depends on the serviceability of the gearbox. This work presents signal processing and soft computing techniques to increase the detection and diagnosis capabilities of wind turbine gearbox monitoring systems based on vibration signal analysis. Although various vibration based fault detection and diagnosis techniques for gearboxes exist in the literature, it is still a difficult task especially because of huge background noise and a large solution search space in real world applications. The objective of this work is to develop a novel, intelligent system for reliable and real time monitoring of wind turbine gearboxes. The developed system incorporates three major processes that include detecting the faults, extracting the features, and making the decisions. The fault detection process uses intelligent filtering techniques to extract faulty information buried in huge background noise. The feature extraction process extracts fault-sensitive and vibration based transient features that best describe the health of the gearboxes. The decision making module implements probabilistic decision theory based on Bayesian inference. This module also devises an intelligent decision theory based on fuzzy logic and fault semantic network. Experimental data from a gearbox test rig and real world data from wind turbines are used to verify the viability, reliability, and robustness of the methods developed in this thesis. The experimental test rig operates at various speeds and allows the implementation of different faults in gearboxes such as gear tooth crack, tooth breakage, bearing faults, iv and shaft misalignment. The application of hybrid conventional and evolutionary optimization techniques to enhance the performance of the existing filtering and fault detection methods in this domain is demonstrated. Efforts have been made to decrease the processing time in the fault detection process and to make it suitable for the real world applications. As compared to classic evolutionary optimization framework, considerable improvement in speed has been achieved with no degradation in the quality of results. The novel features extraction methods developed in this thesis recognize the different faulty signatures in the vibration signals and estimate their severity under different operating conditions. Finally, this work also demonstrates the application of intelligent decision support methods for fault diagnosis in gearboxes. / UOIT

Condition monitoring of hydraulic systems is an area that has grown substantially in the last few decades. This thesis presents a scheme that automatically generates the fault symptoms by on-line processing of raw sensor data from a real test rig. The main purposes of implementing condition monitoring in hydraulic systems are to increase productivity, decrease maintenance costs and increase safety. Since such systems are widely used in industry and becoming more complex in function, reliability of the systems must be supported by an efficient monitoring and maintenance scheme. This work proposes an accurate state space model together with a novel model-based fault diagnosis methodology. The test rig has been fabricated in the Process Automation and Robotics Laboratory at UBC. First, a state space model of the system is derived. The parameters of the model are obtained through either experiments or direct measurements and manufacturer specifications. To validate the model, the simulated and measured states are compared. The results show that under normal operating conditions the simulation program and real system produce similar state trajectories. For the validated model, a condition monitoring scheme based on the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is developed. In simulations, both measurement and process noises are considered. The results show that the algorithm estimates the iii system states with acceptable residual errors. Therefore, the structure is verified to be employed as the fault diagnosis scheme. Five types of faults are investigated in this thesis: loss of load, dynamic friction load, the internal leakage between the two hydraulic cylinder chambers, and the external leakage at either side of the actuator. Also, for each leakage scenario, three levels of leakage are investigated in the tests. The developed UKF-based fault monitoring scheme is tested on the practical system while different fault scenarios are singly introduced to the system. A sinusoidal reference signal is used for the actuator displacement. To diagnose the occurred fault in real time, three criteria, namely residual moving average of the errors, chamber pressures, and actuator characteristics, are considered. Based on the presented experimental results and discussions, the proposed scheme can accurately diagnose the occurred faults.

Commercial building owners spent $167 billion for energy in 2006. Building commissioning services have proven to be successful in saving building energy consumption. However, the optimal energy performance obtained by commissioning may subsequently degrade. The persistence of savings is of significant interest. For commissioning persistence, two statistical approaches, Days Exceeding Threshold-Date (DET-Date) method and Days Exceeding Threshold-Outside Air Temperature (DET-Toa) method, are developed to detect abnormal whole building energy consumption, and two approaches called Cosine Similarity method and Euclidean Distance Similarity method are developed to isolate the possible fault reasons. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated and compared through tests in simulation and real buildings. The impacts of the factors including calibrated simulation model accuracy, fault severity, the time of fault occurrence, reference control change magnitude setting, and fault period length are addressed in the sensitivity study. The study shows that the DET-Toa method and the Cosine Similarity method are superior and more useful for the whole building fault detection and diagnosis.

Fault detection and diagnosis of gear transmission systems have attracted considerable attention in recent years, due to the need to decrease the downtime on production machinery and to reduce the extent of the secondary damage caused by failures. However, little research has been done to develop gear shaft and planetary gear crack detection methods based on vibration signal analysis. In this thesis, an approach to gear shaft and planetary gear fault detection based on the application of the wavelet transform to both the time synchronously averaged (TSA) signal and residual signal is presented. Wavelet approaches themselves are sometimes inefficient for picking up the fault signal characteristic under the presence of strong noise. In this thesis, the autocovariance of maximal energy wavelet coefficients is first proposed to evaluate the gear shaft and planetary gear fault advancement quantitatively. For a comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of some approaches such as using variance, kurtosis, the application of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test), root mean square (RMS) , and crest factor as fault indicators with continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for residual signal, are discussed. It is demonstrated using real vibration data that the early faults in gear shafts and planetary gear can be detected and identified successfully using wavelet transforms combined with the approaches mentioned above. In the second part of the thesis, the planetary gear deterioration process from the new condition to failure is modeled as a continuous time homogeneous Markov process with three states: good, warning, and breakdown. The observation process is represented by two characteristics: variance and RMS based on the analysis of autocovariance of DWT applied to the TSA signal obtained from planetary gear vibration data. The hidden Markov model parameters are estimated by maximizing the pseudo likelihood function using the EM iterative algorithm. Then, a multivariate Bayesian control chart is applied for fault detection. It can be seen from the numerical results that the Bayesian chart performs better than the traditional Chi-square chart.

Fault detection and diagnosis of gear transmission systems have attracted considerable attention in recent years, due to the need to decrease the downtime on production machinery and to reduce the extent of the secondary damage caused by failures. However, little research has been done to develop gear shaft and planetary gear crack detection methods based on vibration signal analysis. In this thesis, an approach to gear shaft and planetary gear fault detection based on the application of the wavelet transform to both the time synchronously averaged (TSA) signal and residual signal is presented. Wavelet approaches themselves are sometimes inefficient for picking up the fault signal characteristic under the presence of strong noise. In this thesis, the autocovariance of maximal energy wavelet coefficients is first proposed to evaluate the gear shaft and planetary gear fault advancement quantitatively. For a comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of some approaches such as using variance, kurtosis, the application of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test), root mean square (RMS) , and crest factor as fault indicators with continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for residual signal, are discussed. It is demonstrated using real vibration data that the early faults in gear shafts and planetary gear can be detected and identified successfully using wavelet transforms combined with the approaches mentioned above. In the second part of the thesis, the planetary gear deterioration process from the new condition to failure is modeled as a continuous time homogeneous Markov process with three states: good, warning, and breakdown. The observation process is represented by two characteristics: variance and RMS based on the analysis of autocovariance of DWT applied to the TSA signal obtained from planetary gear vibration data. The hidden Markov model parameters are estimated by maximizing the pseudo likelihood function using the EM iterative algorithm. Then, a multivariate Bayesian control chart is applied for fault detection. It can be seen from the numerical results that the Bayesian chart performs better than the traditional Chi-square chart.

No description available.

Recent research has demonstrated the use of electrical signature analysis (ESA), that is, the use of induction motor currents and voltages, for early detection of motor faults in the form of embedded algorithms. In the event of multiple motors energized by a common voltage bus, the cost of installing and maintaining fault monitoring and detection devices on each motor may be avoided, by using bus level aggregate electrical measurements to assess the health of the entire population of motors. In this research an approach for detecting commonly encountered induction motor mechanical faults from bus level aggregate electrical measurements is investigated. A mechanical fault indicator is computed processing the raw electrical measurements through a series of signal processing algorithms. Inference of an incipient fault is made by the percentage relative change of the fault indicator from the “healthy” baseline, thus defining a Fault Indicator Change (FIC). To investigate the posed research problem, healthy and faulty motors with broken rotor bar faults are simulated using a detailed transient motor model. The FIC based on aggregate electrical measurements is studied through simulations of different motor banks containing the same faulty motor. The degradation in the FIC when using aggregate measurements, as compared to using individual motor measurements, is investigated. For a given motor bank configuration, the variation in FIC with increasing number of faulty motors is also studied. In addition to simulation studies experimental results from a two-motor setup are analyzed. The FIC and degradation in the FIC in the case of load eccentricity fault, and a combination of shaft looseness and bearing damage is studied through staged fault experiments in the laboratory setup. In this research, the viability of using bus level aggregate electrical measurements for detecting incipient faults in motors energized by a common voltage bus is demonstrated. The proposed approach is limited in that as the power rating fraction of faulty motors to healthy motors in a given configuration decreases, it becomes far more difficult to detect the presence of incipient faults at very early stages.

A novel algorithm for making the combination of outputs in the output zero direction of the plant always equal to zero was formulated. Using this algorithm and the result of MacFarlane and Karcanias, a fault detection scheme was proposed which utilizes the directional property of the multivariable linear system. The fault detection scheme is applicable to linear multivariable systems. Results were obtained for both continuous and discrete linear multivariable systems. A quadruple tank system was used to illustrate the results. The results were further verified by the steady state analysis of the plant.