Design of a fault diagnosis scheme for a class of singular nonlinear systems

A new fault detection and diagnosis approach is developed in this paper for a class of singular nonlinear systems via the use of adaptive updating rules. Both detection and diagnostic observers are established, where Lyapunov stability theory is used to obtain the required adaptive tuning rules for the estimation of the process faults. This has led to stable observation error systems for both fault detection and diagnosis. A simulated numerical example is included to demonstrate the use of the proposed approach and encouraging results have been obtained. © 2008 Editorial Board of Control Theory and Applications, South China University of Technology and Springer-Verlag GmbH.