Robust active fault-tolerant control for internal combustion gas engine for air–fuel ratio control with statistical regression-based observer model

Abstract

Fault-tolerant control systems are utilized in safety and critical applications to achieve greater reliability and availability for continued operation despite faults in the system components. These systems can be utilized in the process plants to avoid costly production loss due to abnormal and unscheduled tripping of the machines. In this paper, advanced fault-tolerant control systems of active type are proposed for air–fuel ratio control of internal combustion gas engine in a process plant to achieve greater reliability and availability to avoid a shutdown of the gas engine. Gas engines are extensively used equipment in the process industry and proper air–fuel ratio control in the fuel system of these engines is quite important to achieve greater engine efficiency, fuel energy savings and environmental protection. Active fault-tolerant control system is proposed in this paper in which linear regression–based observer model is used in the fault detection and isolation unit for fault detection, isolation and reconfiguration. Fuel actuator is introduced in the fuel supply line and proportional feedback controller is implemented to maintain the air–fuel ratio in faulty conditions. Redundancy in the sensors and fuel actuator is proposed to avoid engine shutdown in case of simultaneous faults in more than one sensor and to avoid a single point of failure due to fault in the single actuator. Noise is introduced in the sensor measurements to determine the robustness of proposed active fault-tolerant control system in noisy and faulty conditions. Results show that the proposed system remains stable, maintaining air–fuel ratio well in faulty conditions and is robust to noise.