Year 2006
Lari Tuononen

Development of an online process monitoring system

The process industry is constantly evolving. Globalization, product safety, quality issues, tighter environmental and chemical laws and financial issues create constant pressure to get more out of processes and process control. Process monitoring systems are operator support systems for process control, enabling the prediction of disturbances and equipment failures. Financial benefit is achieved with better product quality and fewer product failures.

The aim of this master’s thesis was to plan and programme an online monitoring system for the process control systems at Outokumpu Technology.

The literature survey comprises an overview of the most important process monitoring methods, such as principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares (PLS) and their variations. It also includes a review of process monitoring cases found in the literature. A survey of commercial process monitoring software is also presented.

The experimental part of the thesis presents software programmed for the purpose of process data analysis and monitoring. The software enables the creation of different monitoring models, such as principal component analysis and partial least squares. In addition, an online Add-in for the Proscon ACT process control software used at Outokumpu Technology was developed for real-time use.

The functionality of the software was tested on experimental data from Outokumpu Chrome’s Kemi mine.

Keywords: Online monitoring, PCA, PLS, SOM, mineral processing

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