Integrated control, diagnosis and reconfiguration of a heat exchanger

Heat exchangers play an important role in chemical and process industries. In order to improve reliability and control performance, intelligent concepts for control, supervision and reconfiguration are necessary. In the paper, an approach is presented which integrates model-based adaptive control and reconfiguration based on fault detection/diagnosis applied to a heat exchanger plant. The adaptive controller and the fault detection scheme are based on a fuzzy model of the process (Takagi-Sugeno type). The fault diagnosis is performed using a self-organizing fuzzy structure.