Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol.85, No.2, 208-219, 2007
Detection and diagnosis of plant-wide oscillations
This paper presents some emerging techniques for detection and root-cause diagnosis of plant-wide oscillations, and demonstrates their efficacy through a successful industrial case study. The recently proposed autocorrelation function based method (Thornhill et al., J. Froc. Control 13, 91-100, 2003a) is used for detection of oscillations in the process measurements. Signals having common oscillations are analyzed for the presence of valve stiction using higher order statistical methods (Choudhury et al., Automatica 40, 1719-1728, 2004b). A method employing changes in controller gain is proposed for distinguishing an internally generated oscillation from an external oscillatory disturbance. This method of changing controller gain is used to confirm the presence of control valve stiction. The proposed techniques have been used successfully to identify the root cause of plant-wide oscillations in an industrial case study using routine operating data.
Keywords:autocorrelation;chemical industry;control loops;control valves;diagnosis;fault diagnosis;non-linearity;oscillation;static friction