Fault Diagnosis on a Digital-Displacement Pump/Motor

A Digital-Displacement Pump/Motor (DDPM) has recently been proposed as an attractive candidate for hydraulic powertrain applications. A DDPM uses solenoid-controlled valves for each cylinder. This provision offers flexibility of control that can be exploited to boost system efficiency by matching individual cylinder operations with load conditions. However, the added complexity from individual cylinder control necessitates mechanisms for fault diagnosis and control reconfiguration to ensure reliable operation of the DDPM. Furthermore, available measurements are often limited to supply and return line pressures, shaft angle and speed. In this paper, it is shown that, with only these measurements, individual cylinder faults are structurally unobservable and un-isolable by the use of a system model relating the cylinder faults to the shaft dynamics. To overcome this difficulty, the phase angles at which possible individual cylinder faults can begin to affect the shaft dynamics are tabulated for each cylinder, and a fault indicator that is akin to a shaft acceleration fault is modeled and estimated via a fast sliding mode observer. Simultaneous detection and isolation of individual cylinder faults can be achieved using this fault indicator and a table of fault begin angles. Illustrative examples are included from simulations of a 5 cylinder DDPM to demonstrate this diagnosis process.