Investigation of Dynamic Multivariate Chemical Process Monitoring

Abstract Chemical process variables are always driven by random noise and disturbances. The closed-loop control yields process measurements that are auto and cross correlated. The influence of auto and cross correlations on statistical process control (SPC) is investigated in detail by Monte Carlo experiments. It is revealed that in the sense of average performance, the false alarms rates (FAR) of principal component analysis (PCA), dynamic PCA are not affected by the time-series structures of process variables. Nevertheless, non-independent identical distribution will cause the actual FAR to deviate from its theoretic value apparently and result in unexpected consecutive false alarms for normal operating process. Dynamic PCA and ARMA-PCA are demonstrated to be inefficient to remove the influences of auto and cross correlations. Subspace identification-based PCA (SI-PCA) is proposed to improve the monitoring of dynamic processes. Through state space modeling, SI-PCA can remove the auto and cross correlations efficiently and avoid consecutive false alarms. Synthetic Monte Carlo experiments and the application in Tennessee Eastman challenge process illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach.