Development of knowledge base of fault diagnosis system in solar power tower plants

Solar Power Tower (SPT) plant is a hugeous and complicated system, thus there have not been relative research productions on the record in the aspect of developing the knowledge base of its Fault Diagnosis System (FDS) in the whole world yet. In this paper, a modular and hierarchical knowledge base of FDS is designed and developed to use in SPT plants according to the characteristics of structure and operation of SPT plants. This knowledge base consists of Main Control Module, Concentrator Subsystem, Receiver Subsystem, Heat Storage Subsystem, Generating Subsystem and Assistant Subsystem. Each subsystem module contains a sub-control module and some secondary subsystem modules. In the knowledge base, knowledge is divided into metaknowledge, facts and rules. Moreover, rules are separated into meta rules, goal rules and diagnosis rules. Production rule representation is adopted to express the knowledge. Uncertainty of knowledge is described in this paper additionally. According to the application of the knowledge base in SPT plant, it is validated that the knowledge base developed in this paper has the characteristics of simple structure and high inference efficiency, which are favorable to simplify the design and development of inference engine.