Fault identification using piezoelectric impedance measurement and model-based intelligent inference with pre-screening

While piezoelectric impedance/admittance measurements have been used for fault detection and identification, the actual identification of fault location and severity remains to be a challenging topic. On one hand, the approach that uses these measurements entertains high detection sensitivity owing to the high-frequency actuation/sensing nature. On the other hand, high-frequency analysis requires high dimensionality in the model and the subsequent inverse analysis contains a very large number of unknowns which often renders the identification problem under-determined. A new fault identification algorithm is developed in this research for piezoelectric impedance/admittance based measurement. Taking advantage of the algebraic relation between the sensitivity matrix and the admittance change measurement, we devise a pre-screening scheme that can rank the likelihoods of fault locations with estimated fault severity levels, which drastically reduces the fault parameter space. A Bayesian inference approach is then incorporated to pinpoint the fault location and severity with high computational efficiency. The proposed approach is examined and validated through case studies.