Using Fault Models in State Observers Methodology for Crack Detection in Continuos Systems

Nowadays a major factor of interest in industries in relationship to development of new techniques for detection and localization of faults it is the concern with the security of their systems. There is need for supervising and monitoring in order to detect and correct any fault as fast as possible. It is verified actually, that some determined parameters of the systems may vary during the process, due to the specific characteristics or the natural wearing of its components. It is known that even in well-designed systems the occurrence of cracks in some components can cause economic losses or lead to dangerous situations. With the help of the state observers methodology one can reconstruct the unmeasured states of the system, since that it is observable, becoming possible in this way to estimate the measures for locations of difficult access. The technique of state observers consists in developing a model for the system under analysis and comparing the estimate of outcome with the measured one, the difference between these two resulting in a residue that is used for analysis. In this work a bank of signals associated to a model of crack was assembled in order to follow its progress. The data acquired from the computational simulations in a cantilever beam discretized by means of the technique of finite elements, had been sufficiently satisfactory, validating the proposed methodology.