Conventional fault detection method based on fast independent component analysis (FastICA) is sensitive to outliers in the modeling data and thus may perform poorly under the adverse effects of outliers. To solve such problem, a new fault detection method for non-Gaussian process based on robust independent component analysis (RobustICA) is proposed in this paper. A RobustICA algorithm which can effectively reduce the effects of outliers is firstly developed to estimate the mixing matrix and extract non-Gaussian feature called independent components (ICs) by robust whitening and robust determination of the maximum non-Gaussian directions. Furthermore, a monitoring statistic for each extracted IC is constructed to detect process faults. Simulations on a simple example of the mixing matrix estimation and a fault detection example in the continuous stirred tank reactor system demonstrate that the RobustICA achieves much higher estimation accuracy for the mixing matrix and the ICs than the commonly used FastICA algorithm, and the RobustICA-based fault detection method outperforms the conventional FastICA-based fault detection method in terms of the fault detection time and fault detection rate. (C) 2013 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.