Joint Feature and Model Selection for SVM Fault Diagnosis in Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Systems

This paper describes an original technique for the joint feature and model selection in the context of support vector machine (SVM) classification applied as a diagnosis strategy in model-based fault detection and isolation (FDI). We demonstrate that the proposed technique contributes to the solution of an open research problem: to design a robust FDI procedure, correctly functioning with different operating conditions and fault sizes, specifically settled for an electric generation system based on solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). By using a quantitative model of the generation system coupled to an optimized SVM classifier, a satisfactory FDI procedure is achieved, which is robust against modeling and measurement errors and is compliant with practical deployment.