Data Driven Monitoring of Energy Systems: Gaussian Process Kernel Machine for Fault Identification with Application to Boiling Water Reactors

Abstract

Energy production units are large complex installations comprised of several smaller units, subsystems, and mechanical components, whose monitoring and control to secure safe operation are high demanding tasks. In particular, human operators are required to monitor a high volume of incoming data and must make critical decisions in very short time. Although they are explicitly trained in such situations, there are cases that may not be able to identify a gradually developing crucial faulty state. To that end, automated systems can be used for monitoring operational quantities and detecting potential faults in time. The field of machine learning offers a variety of tools that may be used as the ground for developing automated monitoring and control systems for energy systems. In the current chapter, we present an approach that adopts a single Gaussian process learning machine in monitoring high complex energy systems. The Gaussian process is a data-driven model assigned to monitor a set of operational parameters. The values of the operational parameters at a specific instance comprise the system’s operational vector at that time instance. The operational vector consists the input to the individual Gaussian process machine whose task is to classify the operation of the system either as normal (or steady state) or match it to a faulty state. The presented approach is benchmarked on a set of experimentally data taken from the Fix-II test facility that is a representation of a Boiling Water Reactor. Obtained results exhibit the potential of Gaussian processes in monitoring highly complex systems such as nuclear reactors, by identifying with high accuracy the faults in system operation.