A REVIEW ON PROCESS FAULT DETECTION AND DIAGNOSIS

Garcia, Maria Cecille S.

INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
Process Controls have greatly helped the productivity of industries throughout the years as it
transitioned some of the physical labors needed in a plant to a system programmed in an automated
manner. It lessens the physical intervention during process runtime while maintaining process
stability. It is considered to have a major impact on the plant’s economy whereas with its help on
process monitoring, one can reduce process downtime, increase process reliability, improve product
quality and process safety.
However, even with all the advances made on Control Systems, a very important control task
in managing process plants still relies largely on manual activity, performed by engineers. This is the
task of detecting the causal origin of process faults and responding to that abnormal events caused
by it. Responding to these faults means timely detection where it should not be done hastily but
efficiently; considering prior knowledge on the process, the parameters laid out and the time needed
to resolve the faults preventing a plant shutdown. This entire activity has come to be called Abnormal
Event Management (AEM), a key component of supervisory control.
Troubleshooting an issue on site usually involves a thorough process that sometimes poses a
great deal of difficulty due to several factors. It is difficult due to the broad scope of activities that
involves a variety of malfunctions such as process unit failures, process unit degradation, parameter
drifts and so on. It is also further complicated by some constraints in the plant, like in a continuous
process not every line has a parameter indicator and not every indicator is connected or is has a
shared monitor to the plant’s control room so there are times that there is a need to go to site
personally and collect data. Aside from that process indicators have some biases due to different
environment conditions where it is exposed to.
Given such difficult conditions, it should come as no surprise that engineers tend to make
human errors and use that in interpreting the fault making things worse when it comes to taking
subsequent actions. Based from literature, Industrial statistics show that 70% of the industrial
accidents are caused by human errors.
Thus, the challenge here is for us to lessen the errors made from various constraints and
human errors by designing and implementing an intelligent control system that can assist engineers
while dealing with AEM.

SIGNIFICANCE
Nowadays prolonging a continuous process is quite a challenge. Issues arises here and there;
modern systems and equipment are often subjected to unexpected changes, and product quality
specifications are not always met. Troubleshooting these things usually takes time, leading to an
increase down time and a great loss of profit.
In order to improve plant reliability much efforts should be devoted in automating process faults
and detection as it can greatly contribute to operational quality by:
  Early Detection of abnormality in plants to avoid severe damage and, as a result,
reduce repair costs and unplanned plant shut-down costs,
 Improving Plant Reliability and Availability,
 Optimizing maintenance activities (for instance, providing information for preventative
maintenance),
 Reducing storage costs of spare parts.
 Increasing plant transparency and providing information for organizational activities
such as asset management,

GENERAL CONCEPTS
A fault is generally defined as a departure from an acceptable range of an observed variable or
a calculated parameter associated with a process (Himmelblau, 1978). It is to be understood as an
unexpected change of system function, although it may not lead to physical failure or breakdown.
Faults hamper or disturb the normal system operation, thus causing process disruptions that can lead
to process down time.
The underlying causes of these faults, such as failed
equipment is called the basic event or the root cause. Diagnosing
the root cause can be a handful since a lot of factors are to be
considered. Fig. 1 depicts the components of a general fault
diagnosis framework. The figure shows a controlled process
system and indicates the different sources of failures in it. In
general, one has to deal with three classes of failures namely:
Gross parameter changes in a model, Structural changes and
Malfunctioning sensors and actuators.
Figure 1: A general diagnostic framework
After getting down to the possible causes of faults, depicting
the characteristic of the diagnostic system should also be considered. As this is where various
computer aided approaches would be assess using a common set of criteria. Then once those
approaches were narrowed down. Transformation of data for diagnostic decision making will follow.
SPECIFIC CONCEPTS/SPECIAL DEVELOPMENTS
Fault diagnosis system is a monitoring or supervision system which is used to detect and
isolate faults and identify their type or characteristics in a system. The essential task of fault diagnosis
are Fault Detection and Fault isolation. Fault Detection is where a binary decision making is done
either something has gone wrong or that everything is fine. While Fault Isolation is where it
determines the source of the fault like for example, which sensor, actuator or component has become
faulty.
Venkatasubramanian et al. provided a systematic and comparative study of various diagnostic
methods from different perspectives. They classified fault diagnosis methods into three general
categories, quantitative model-based methods, qualitative model-based methods and process history-
based methods.

CONCLUSIONS
Process Fault Detection is an important component in the long-term reliable operation of any
automated controlled system. However, one of the most important challenges our industries facing
today is the design and implementation of intelligent control systems that can assist operators and
engineers in detecting and diagnosing these faults to make a supervisory control decision with
corresponding actions.
Various papers have laid out several ways on how to present Process monitoring systems that will
achieve success in the future will need to meet a variety of system needs such as robustness, ability
to handle uncertainties, and ability to utilize large amounts of data.

Process Fault Detection and Diagnosis will play an even more important role in plant supervision,
control and management.
Process faults can be detected and be effectively addressed by the emerging intelligent control
systems paradigm which has the goal of automating supervisory control tasks currently handled
manually by human operators and engineers.

REFERENCES