PhD Defence by Mehdi Gholami

Time & Place:  Monday, August 29, 2011 at 13.00
Aalborg University, Fredrik Bajers Vej 7, room B3-104 (Auditorium)

Title: Active Fault Tolerant Control of Livestock Stable Ventilation System

Abstract:
Modern stables and greenhouses are equipped with different components for providing a comfortable climate for animals and plant. A component malfunction may result in loss of production. Therefore, it is desirable to design a control system, which is stable, and is able to provide an acceptable degraded performance even in the faulty case.

In this thesis, we have designed such controllers for climate control systems of livestock buildings in three steps:

• Deriving a model for the climate control system of a pig-stable.
• Designing an active fault diagnosis (AFD) algorithm for different kinds of fault.
• Designing a fault tolerant control scheme for the climate control system.

In the first step, a conceptual multi-zone model for climate control of a live-stock building is derived. In the next step, two methods for active fault diagnosis are proposed. The AFD methods excite the system by injecting a so-called excitation input. Two different algo-rithms, the EKF and a new adaptive filter, are used to detect the faults. Fault tolerant con-troller (FTC) is based on a switching scheme between a set of predefined passive fault tol-erant controller (PFTC). In the FTC part of the thesis, first a passive fault tolerant controller (PFTC) based on state feed-back is proposed for discrete-time piecewise affine (PWA) systems. Only actuator faults are considered.

Then the PFTC problem is reformulated as a feasibility of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs).

Assessment Committee:
Associate Professor Jan Dimon Bendtsen, Aalborg University, Denmark (chairman)
Professor Didier Maquin, National Polytechnic Institute of Nancy, France
Associate Professor Hans Henrik Niemann, Technical University, Denmark

Supervisor:
Associate Professor Henrik Schiøler, Aalborg University, Denmark

Moderator:
Associate Professor Kirsten Mølgaard Nielsen, Aalborg University, Denmark

After the defence there will be a reception in C3-205
All are welcome!