Sensor placement for fault diagnosis based on structural models: application to a fuel cell stak system

The present work aims to increase the diagnosis systems capabilities by choosing the location of sensors in the process. Therefore, appropriate sensor location will lead to better diagnosis performance and implementation easiness. The work is based on structural models ands some simplifications are considered in order to only focus on the sensor placement analysis. Several approaches are studied to solve the sensor placement problem. All of them find the optimal sensor configuration. The sensor placement techniques are applied to a fuel cell stack system. The model used to describe the behaviour of this system consists of non-linear equations. Furthermore, there are 30 candidate sensors to improve the diagnosis specifications. The results obtained from this case study are used to strength the applicability of the proposed approaches.