Fault diagnosis methods for district heating substations

A district heating substation is a demanding process for fault diagnosis. The process is nonlinear, load conditions of the district heating network change unpredictably and standard instrumentation is designed only for control and local monitoring purposes, not for automated diagnosis. Extra instrumentation means additional cost, which is usually not acceptable to consumers. That is why all conventional methods are not applicable in this environment. The paper presents five different approaches to fault diagnosis. While developing the methods, various kinds of pragmatic aspects and robustness had to be considered in order to achieve practical solutions. The presented methods are: classification of faults using performance indexing, static and physical modelling of process equipment, energy balance of the process, interactive fault tree reasoning and statistical tests. The methods are applied to a control valve, a heat exchanger, a mud separating device and the whole process. The developed methods are verified in practice using simulation, emulation or field tests.