Abstract
District heating systems are critical infrastructures for thermal decarbonization, yet their performance depends on coordinated thermo-hydraulic behavior across primary networks, substations, and secondary building systems. In practice, monitoring relies on measurements including supply temperature, return temperature, and mass flow. From these measurements, operators must detect abnormal behavior and identify its root cause across a coupled thermo-hydraulic system. Fault propagation is regime- and control-dependent. Variations in load, hydraulic conditions, and closed-loop control reshape how faults propagate and appear at the substation interface. Under certain operating conditions, faults may remain undetectable, while distinct mechanisms may generate indistinguishable measurement signatures. Fault detection and diagnosis is therefore constrained by detectability and distinguishability limits rather than by algorithmic performance alone. This PhD proposal will address these limits through a system-level, physics-consistent investigation. A validated thermo-hydraulic simulation environment will be used to emulate parametric faults under controlled variation of operating regimes and control configurations, while restricting observation to standard interface measurements. Detectability and diagnostic ambiguity will be quantified and embedded into a regime-aware fault detection and diagnosis framework.
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