Selection of Sensors by a New Methodology Coupling a Classification Technique and Entropy Criteria

Complex industrial processes invest a lot of money in sensors and automation devices to monitor and supervise the process in order to guarantee the production quality and the plant and operators safety. Fault detection is one of the multiple tasks of process monitoring and it critically depends on the sensors that measure the significant process variables. Nevertheless, most of the work on fault detection and diagnosis found in literature place more emphasis on developing procedures to perform diagnosis given a set of sensors, and less on determining the actual location of sensors for efficient identification of faults. A methodology based on learning and classification techniques and on the information quantity measured by the Entropy concept, is proposed in order to address the problem of sensor location for fault identification. The proposed methodology has been applied to a continuous intensified reactor, the ‘open plate reactor (OPR)’, developed by Alfa Laval and studied at the Laboratory of Chemical Engineering of Toulouse. The different steps of the methodology are explained through its application to the carrying out of an exothermic reaction.