Classification as an aid tool for the selection of sensors used for fault detection and isolation

Complex industrial processes demand significant financial investment in sensors and automation devices to monitor and supervise the process in order to guarantee the production quality and the plant and operators safety. Fault detection is one of the multiple tasks of process monitoring and it critically depends on the sensors that measure the significant process variables. Nevertheless, most of the work on fault detection and diagnosis found in literature place more emphasis on developing procedures to perform diagnosis given a set of sensors, and less on determining the actual location of sensors for efficient identification of faults. A methodology based on learning and classification techniques and the information quantity measure, by the entropy concept, is proposed in order to address the problem of sensor location for fault identification. The proposed methodology has been applied to a new concept of intensification reactor, the Open Plate Reactor, developed by Alfa Laval and the Laboratory of Chemical Engineering located at Toulouse.