Fault diagnosis of industrial actuators in a sugar factory: a European study

The EC funded research network study DAMADICS has provided the opportunity to integrate together the expertise of 8 University partners with broad experience in modelling, fault diagnosis, process control, computational intelligence and mechatronics. The application study of fault diagnosis of actuators in a sugar factory at Lublin has enabled some interesting and realistic industry-focused research to be carried out. The usual scenario is that work of this nature is carried out by control system suppliers at high cost; the commercial and cost implications normally rule out the development and application of novel University-based methods. Some of the ideas, concepts and results of this work are presented in this paper but the work is on-going and both results and plant data are generally available for research and development. This facility will continue to provide an important facility for the evaluation of control systems and process monitoring concepts, including fault-tolerant control and supervision.