Detection of asymmetric control valve stiction from oscillatory data using an extended Hammerstein system identification method

The study in this paper is motivated by the detection of control valves with asymmetric stiction resulting in oscillations in feedback control loops. The joint characterization of the control valve and the controlled process is formulated as the identification of a class of extended Hammerstein systems. The input non-linearity is described by a point-slope-based hysteretic model with two possibly asymmetric ascent and descent paths. An iterative identification method is proposed, based on the idea of separating the ascent and descent paths subject to the oscillatory input and output. The structure of the formulated extended Hammerstein system is shown to be identifiable, and the oscillatory signals in feedback control loops are proved to be informative by exploiting the cyclo-stationarity of these oscillatory signals. Numerical, experimental and industrial examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed identification method. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.