An Improved Fault Diagnosis Strategy for Process Monitoring Using Reconstruction Based Contributions

Abstract

Air pollution has become the fourth leading cause of premature death on Earth. Air pollution causes poor health and death; about one case out of every ten deaths worldwide is caused by air pollution, which is six times more than malaria. Human activities are the main cause of air pollution, such as chemical industries, road traffic, and fossil fuel power plants. Over the span of several years, monitoring air quality has become an exigent and essential task. In order to limit the health impact of air pollution and to ensure safe operation of chemical processes, it is necessary to quickly detect and locate instrumentation defects. There are several process monitoring techniques in the literature. Among these techniques is the one selected for this work for the detection and location of sensor faults: the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) method, which was selected for its primary advantages of easy employment and less necessity for prior knowledge. Using the KPCA method for monitoring nonlinear systems, the calculation cost and the memory size are related to the number of initial data. This is currently a major limitation of the KPCA method, especially in industrial environments. In order to remedy this limitation, in this paper we propose a new method of detection and localization. The key idea of this approach is to extend the method of localization based on the principle of reconstruction-based contributions (RBC) by downsizing the kernel matrix in the characteristic space. The proposed technique is named reconstruction-based contribution reduced rank kernel principal component analysis(RBC-RRKPCA). The approach is demonstrated using real air quality monitoring network data and simulated data from the Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) as a challenging benchmark problem. We also present a comparative study of the performances of the conventional diagnostic technique RBC-KPCA and the proposed technique RBC-RRKPCA. The results in this paper reveal that the proposed technique achieves the highest detection and localization accuracy.