A novel approach for fault detection and classification of the thermocouple sensor in Nuclear Power Plant using Singular Value Decomposition and Symbolic Dynamic Filter

A mathematical model with two layers is developed using data-driven methods for thermocouple sensor fault detection and classification in Nuclear Power Plants (NPP). The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based method is applied to detect the faulty sensor from a data set of all sensors, at the first layer. In the second layer, the Symbolic Dynamic Filter (SDF) is employed to classify the fault pattern. If SVD detects any false fault, it is also re-evaluated by the SDF, i.e., the model has two layers of checking to balance the false alarms. The proposed fault detection and classification method is compared with the Principal Component Analysis. Two case studies are taken from Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) to prove the efficiency of the proposed method