Fault diagnosis is an ongoing significant research field due to the constantly increasing need for maintainability, reliability and safety of industrial plants. The pneumatic actuators are installed in harsh environment: high temperature, pressure, aggressive media and vibration, etc. This influenced the pneumatic actuator predicted life time. The failures in pneumatic actuator cause forces the installation shut down and may also determine the final quality of the product. A Self-Organizing Map based approach is implemented to detect the external faults such as Actuator vent blockage, Diaphragm leakage and in correct supply pressure. The Self-Organizing Map is able to identify the actuator condition with high accuracy by monitoring five parameters. The parameter selection is based on the committee of DAMADICS (Development and Application of Methods for Actuator Diagnosis in Industrial Control Systems). The Self-Organizing Map Systems were implemented in real time using MATLAB and the results prove that the system can effectively classify all the types of external faults.
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