Differentiation between Process and Equipment Drifts in Chemical Plants

The performance of chemical plants is inevitably related to knowledge about the current state of the system. However, both process and equipment drifts may distort state information. Deviations of process values caused by equipment malfunction may be misinterpreted as process drifts and vice versa. Determining the cause of the drift is further complicated by the fact that equipment drifts typically occur in combination with process drifts. This paper presents a method that uses available additional equipment data to reliably detect and decouple combined equipment and process drifts in chemical plants by combining statistical methods with model-based approaches. The utility of additional equipment information is assessed based on its effect on the decoupling of process and equipment drifts. First results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in a real plant.