DETECTION AND QUANTIFICATION OF CONTROL VALVE NONLINEARITIES USING HILBERT-HUANG TRANSFORM

Two of the most important sources of degradation of control loop performance are (i) valve stiction and (ii) tight controller tuning, both of which lead to oscillations in closed-loop outputs. A factor that distinguishes these two sources is the nonlinear signature of the valve stiction; a tightly tuned controller produces oscillations due to a linear source. Detection and isolation of nonlinear fault sources is essential to correctly determine the cause of poor loop performance of control loops. Despite a rich research activity in this area, there is hardly a method which can isolate the simultaneous effects of these two sources. Moreover, the traditional spectral analysis based on Fourier Transforms is largely restricted by the assumption of stationarity in the data to detect and quantify valve nonlinearities. In this work, Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) is used to (i) detect valve nonlinearities and (ii) isolate linear and nonlinear fault sources. The key characteristic of HHT is that it represents nonlinearities as intra-wave frequency modulations allowing it to distinguish it from linearities which do not exhibit such modulations. The advantages of HHT-based methods are that (i) nonlinearities translate to a unique signature (ii) nonstationarities in data can be handled in a natural way. It is observed that nonlinearity is captured by a Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) obtained from the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) of the process output. The HilbertHuang spectrum of these IMFs exhibits intra-wave frequency modulation. The power spectrum of the IMFs shows the presence of harmonics which is used to characterize the valve stiction nonlinearity. Subsequent to detection, quantification is done using the power spectrum of the IMFs. The proposed method is sensitive enough to detect low levels of valve stiction nonlinearities. Results from simulation using one-parameter valve stiction model are presented in support of the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate the advantage and potential of the HHT-based method.