On Friday, October 28th, 2016, UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) graduate fellow William Hale (Billy) received a travel award to attend and present his work at the annual Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations / Chemical Process Control (FOCAPO/CPC) 2017 conference. This award covers the cost of stay for the duration of the conference, January 8 – 12, 2017.
Billy is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Dr. George Bollas in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at UConn. The work he will be presenting is on model-based active fault detection and isolation. In this work, a general formulation for maintenance testing is developed by optimizing inputs to produce unique system responses in the presence of various faults. The formulation is then applied to a gas compression system prone to several different actuator and sensor faults, and the results from this optimization show complete isolation of the 8 faults studied. Future work will focus on modifying the formulation to be robust to system uncertainties. Billy hopes that by attending this conference he will obtain valuable experiences and connections that will benefit him for the years to come as he continues working towards his Ph.D.