Dynamic Process Monitoring Based on Dot Product Feature Analysis for Thermal Power Plants

Data-driven process monitoring is an effective approach to assure safe operation of modern manufacturing and energy systems, such as thermal power plants being studied in this work. Industrial processes are inherently dynamic and need to be monitored using dynamic algorithms. Mainstream dynamic algorithms rely on concatenating current measurement with past data. This work proposes a new, alternative dynamic process monitoring algorithm, using dot product feature analysis (DPFA). DPFA computes the dot product of consecutive samples, thus naturally capturing the process dynamics through temporal correlation. At the same time, DPFA's online computational complexity is lower than not just existing dynamic algorithms, but also classical static algorithms (e.g., principal component analysis and slow feature analysis). The detectability of the new algorithm is analyzed for three types of faults typically seen in process systems: sensor bias, process fault and gain change fault. Through experiments with a numerical example and real data from a thermal power plant, the DPFA algorithm is shown to be superior to the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of better monitoring performance (fault detection rate and false alarm rate) and lower computational complexity.