System identification and fault reconstruction in solar plants via extended Kalman filter-based training of recurrent neural networks

This article proposes using the extended Kalman filter (EKF) for recurrent neural network (RNN) training and fault estimation within a parabolic-trough solar plant. The initial step involves employing an RNN to model the system. Given the challenge of fault discernibility in the collectors, parallel EKFs are employed to reconstruct the parameters of the faults. The parameters are used independently to estimate the system output, and the type of fault is isolated based on the estimation errors using another feedforward neural network. To evaluate the effectiveness of the methodology, simulations are conducted on a loop of the ACUREX plant with irradiances from sunny and cloudy days. The results reveal a fault classification accuracy of approximately 90% and a fault reconstruction error below 3%, with even better accuracies in the cloudy dataset than in the sunny dataset.