Possibilities of fault tolerant control in thermal power plants

Fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control applications require that the structure of the target process contains certain redundancy in system observability and controllability. Usually the analysis of the existence of these properties is based on the laborious state space model of the process. However, the state space model is not necessary needed for the analysis. In this paper a structural analysis based on oriented bi-partite graphs is applied to analyze the properties of a thermal power plant process to show the redundant structures required for diagnostics and fault tolerant control. The analysis method is demonstrated by analyzing the structure of the secondary and tertiary air system of the boiler.