Statistical Monitoring of Complex Multivariate Processes: With Applications in Industrial Process Control

Chapter 4

Application to a chemical reaction process

This chapter summarizes an application of MSPC, described in Chapters 1 to 3, to recorded data from a chemical reaction process, producing solvent chemicals. Data from this process have been studied in the literature using PCA and PLS, for example (Chen and Kruger 2006; Kruger et al. 2001; Kruger and Dimitriadis 2008; Lieftucht et al. 2006a). Sections 4.1 and 4.2 provide a process description and show how to determine a PCA monitoring model, respectively. Finally, Section 4.3 demonstrates how to detect and diagnose a fluidization problem in one of the tubes.

4.1 Process description

This process produces two solvent chemicals, denoted as F and G, and consists of several unit operations. The core elements of this plant are five parallel fluidized bed reactors, each producing F and G by complex exothermic reactions. These reactors are fed with five different reactants. Figure 4.1 shows one of the parallel reactors.

Figure 4.1 Schematic diagram of chemical reaction process.

Streams A, B and C represent fresh reactant feed supplying pure components A, B and C, while feedstream D is from an upstream unit. Stream E is plant recycle. Streams D and E are vaporized before entering the reactor. After leaving the reactors, the separation of components F and G is achieved by downstream distillation units.

Each reactor consists of a large ...