The Development of a Fault Diagnosis Model Based on Principal Component Analysis and Support Vector Machine for a Polystyrene Reactor

In chemical processes, unintended faults can make serious accidents. To tackle them, proper fault diagnosis models should be designed to identify the root cause of faults. To design a fault diagnosis model, a process and its data should be analyzed. However, most previous researches in the field of fault diagnosis just handle the data set of benchmark processes simulated on commercial programs. It indicates that it is really hard to get fresh data sets on real processes. In this study, real faulty conditions of an industrial polystyrene process are tested. In this process, a runaway reaction occurred and this caused a large loss since operators were late aware of the occurrence of this accident. To design a proper fault diagnosis model, we analyzed this process and a real accident data set. At first, a mode classification model based on support vector machine (SVM) was trained and principal component analysis (PCA) model for each mode was constructed under normal operation conditions. The results show that a proposed model can quickly diagnose the occurrence of a fault and they indicate that this model is able to reduce the potential loss.