Non-linear analog circuit fault diagnosis with large change sensitivity

Large change sensitivity has been proved efficient at, but restricted to, generating a linear circuit fault dictionary. This paper discusses the extension of large change sensitivity to non-linear analog circuit fault diagnosis. The fault dictionary is divided into d.c. and a.c. sections. In the d.c. domain, non-linear components are approximated with piecewise linear models. By relating the operating region of each piecewise linear model to the magnitude of a single fault in a procedure termed preconditioning, it is shown that large change sensitivity can efficiently compute the response of a faulty non-linear circuit. Results presented of an analysis of computational complexity show a significant reduction in the cost of simulating single linear resistor faults in a non-linear circuit using this method. In addition, after establishing that the resistive portion of the circuit is fault free, a fault dictionary is constructed for dynamic components using large change sensitivity in the small signal a.c. domain. Included with a discussion on the issues of large change sensitivity based simulation-before-test, a small non-linear circuit is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis algorithm. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.