In this paper a novel approach for the fault detection and diagnosis of the actuators in nonlinear systems is presented. The faults are assumed to be any unexpected changes of the parameters in the actuators, which include either abrupt changes or slowly drifting changes. Firstly a known nonlinear system is considered, where an adaptive diagnostic model incorporating the estimate of fault is constructed. The diagnostic algorithm is then developed which produces the estimate of the fault so that the error between the system output and that of the model is minimised. Unknown nonlinear systems are then studied using a feedforward neural network trained to estimate the system under healthy conditions. Taking the trained neural network as the neuro model of the system, similar detection and diagnostic algorithms to that of known systems are obtained which are still capable of producing a good estimate for the fault. The method is demonstrated using a simulated nonlinear system and good results are obtained.