Elsevier

Journal of Process Control

Volume 15, Issue 8, December 2005, Pages 931-941
Journal of Process Control

Short communication
PSCMAP: A new tool for plant-wide oscillation detection

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jprocont.2005.01.005Get rights and content

Abstract

A commonly encountered issue in process industry is concerned with the detection of plant-wide oscillations. In this paper, a new visualization tool termed as the power spectral correlation map (PSCMAP) is proposed for this purpose. The proposed colour map is based on a new measure defined as the power spectral correlation index (PSCI). A simple clustering algorithm is developed to group blocks of variables with similar spectral shapes. The combined visualization tool is shown to be simple, effective and powerful in collecting variables with common frequency-domain behaviour in a multivariate process. The potential of the combined technique is illustrated by an application to two industrial processes, (i) a simulated pulp and paper process and (ii) a SE Asia refinery.

Section snippets

Motivation

The detection of plant-wide oscillations is concerned with the identification of a set of signals (or measurements) oscillating at similar frequencies, but not necessarily in phase with each other. Such a problem is of great practical significance since it involves the identification of common cause disturbances whose effects propagate to many units and thus may impact overall process performance. The causes of oscillations, their influence on poor performance, and their benefits to the economy

Power spectral correlation index

The power spectral correlation index (PSCI) is defined as the correlation between the power spectra of two different measurements. It is a measure of the similarity of spectral shapes, i.e., measure of the commonness of frequencies of oscillations. The procedure to calculate the correlation is illustrated in the block diagram shown in Fig. 1.

The DFTs that are used to calculate the spectrum are calculated after removal of means from the time-series data. However, the correlation used in the

Power spectral correlation map

For multivariate processes, the PSCI is a matrix of size m × m, where m is the number of measured variables. In order to provide an effective interpretation of the PSCI, the matrix is plotted as a colour map, which is termed as the power spectral correlation map. The intensity as well as the type of colour in the map is assigned in proportion to the value of the correlation index. This mapping is performed according to the choice of colour and the number of shades in that colour.

An important

Case study 1: Entech data

We first consider the data set from a simulated industrial process, courtesy of Entech Control Inc.

The simulated process shown in Fig. 2 consists of a pulp manufacturing process, where the hardwood and softwood pulps are mixed to give a stream of desired composition. The data set comprised 1934 samples from 12 process measurements (tags), each of which was associated with 12 control loops. The objective of this analysis is to detect oscillations in the loops and isolate those loops with common

Conclusions

A new visualization tool, namely, the PSCMAP has been proposed to identify and extract the measurements from a large plant with several variables oscillating at similar frequencies. The visualization tool is based on a new measure, PSCI, which is a non-centered correlation between the spectra of measurements. The proposed method requires minimal computational complexity and effort. A simple clustering algorithm has been introduced to automate the re-arrangement of variables with similar

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful for the financial support of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC, Canada), Matrikon (Edmonton, Alberta) and the Alberta Science and Research Authority (ASRA) through the NSERC-Matrikon-ASRA Industrial Research Chair in Process Control.

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