Integral Sensor Fault Detection and Isolation for Railway Traction Drive

Abstract

Due to the increasing importance of reliability and availability of electric traction drives in Railway applications, early detection of faults has become an important key for Railway traction drive manufacturers. Sensor faults are important sources of failures. Among the different fault diagnosis approaches, in this article an integral diagnosis strategy for sensors in traction drives is presented. Such strategy is composed of an observer-based approach for direct current (DC)-link voltage and catenary current sensors, a frequency analysis approach for motor current phase sensors and a hardware redundancy solution for speed sensors. None of them requires any hardware change requirement in the actual traction drive. All the fault detection and isolation approaches have been validated in a Hardware-in-the-loop platform comprising a Real Time Simulator and a commercial Traction Control Unit for a tram. In comparison to safety-critical systems in Aerospace applications, Railway applications do not need instantaneous detection, and the diagnosis is validated in a short time period for reliable decision. Combining the different approaches and existing hardware redundancy, an integral fault diagnosis solution is provided, to detect and isolate faults in all the sensors installed in the traction drive.

A Hybrid Sensor Fault Diagnosis for Maintenance in Railway Traction Drives

“…Although the LO is not discarded for this application, being the system lineal, (as it was previously tested in [12], due to the additional properties of the SMO, such as the possibility to provide the fault reconstruction and the robustness to disturbances), this observer will be analyzed. Thus, based on the inhered disturbance presented in the catenary of a railway application, an FDD strategy based on an SMO for an augmented system has been selected.…”

“…Although the LO is not discarded for this application, being the system lineal, (as it was previously tested in [12], due to the additional properties of the SMO, such as the possibility to provide the fault reconstruction and the robustness to disturbances), this observer will be analyzed.…”

“…Because of the sensors' contribution to traction control strategy, a sensor failure leads to a loss of availability of the railway traction drive. Thus, fault diagnosis approaches have been implemented in current, voltage and speed sensors in railway traction drive systems [9][10][11][12]. In most of them, model-based techniques have been utilized, although data-driven techniques have been presented too [13].…”

Sensor Fault Reconstruction based on Adaptive Sliding Mode Observer for Forklift Fault-Tolerant Control System

“…A fault observer was developed to assess fault information and faulty SBW systems. The minimax model predictive control in the delta domain was deployed to achieve tracking performance in the event of an actuator fault, system uncertainties, and disturbances [14,15]. Yosra Rkhissi-Kammoun et al focused on single and multiple current FDI sensors for induction motor drives in an electric vehicle; two models based on diagnostic methods were proposed; the first one was a differential algebraic estimation of fault dynamics and the second one was based on a combination of the Robust Integral Sign of the Error observer [16].…”

A Review in Fault Diagnosis and Health Assessment for Railway Traction Drives

“…Furthermore, although during the last decade several publications related to fault diagnosis and health assessment in Railway traction drives have been published [25,[31][32][33], there is not a review, which summarizes all the research work done in Railway traction drives. Previous review works are focused on sensors more than in fault diagnosis [21] or on fault diagnosis in railway traction power supply [18].…”