Fault detection and fault tolerant control of a smart base isolation system with magneto-rheological damper

Fault detection and isolation (FDI) in real-time systems can provide early warnings for faulty sensors and actuator signals to prevent events that lead to catastrophic failures. The main objective of this paper is to develop FDI and fault tolerant control techniques for base isolation systems with magneto-rheological (MR) dampers. Thus, this paper presents a fixed-order FDI filter design procedure based on linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a solution for detecting and isolating faults using the H-infinity formulation is provided in the proposed filter design. Furthermore, an FDI-filter-based fuzzy fault tolerant controller (FFTC) for a base isolation structure model was designed to preserve the pre-specified performance of the system in the presence of various unknown faults. Simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the designed filter can successfully detect and isolate faults from displacement sensors and accelerometers while maintaining excellent performance of the base isolation technology under faulty conditions.