Statistical process monitoring based on improved principal component analysis and its application to chemical processes

In this paper, a novel criterion is proposed to determine the retained principal components (PCs) that capture the dominant variability of online monitored data. The variations of PCs were calculated according to their mean and covariance changes between the modeling sample and the online monitored data. The retained PCs containing dominant variations were selected and defined as correlative PCs (CPCs). The new Hotelling’s T2 statistic based on CPCs was then employed to monitor the process. Case studies on the simulated continuous stirred tank reactor and the well-known Tennessee Eastman process demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the CPCs-based fault detection methods.