A Method of Online Safety Assessment for Industrial Process Operations Based on Hopf Bifurcation Analysis

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach of online safety assessment for industrial process operations. The core idea is to apply the Hopf bifurcation analysis of nonlinear systems in safety assessment. Herein, the Hopf bifurcation equations are used to characterize the critical stability boundary or manifold of the system, which is taken as the safety limit. Then, a safety index (SI) is constructed to denote the integrated exponential distances between each parameter and their bifurcation points. In the online implementation, the parameters are estimated by the extended Kalman filter (EKF), and the Hopf bifurcation points are generated by solving the nonlinear bifurcation equations. Afterward, the value of the SI can be online calculated. The introduced approach was then applied to a simulated gas phase polyethylene reactor process, in which the efficiency of the proposed method was verified in indicating the distance to the potential unsafe oscillation and in the early identification of potential threats.