Root cause diagnosis of plant-wide oscillations using the concept of adjacency matrix

Oscillations are a common type of plant-wide disturbances whose effects propagate to many units and thus may impact overall process performance. It is important to detect and diagnose such oscillations early in order to rectify the situation. Many frequency domain tools such as the power spectrum and spectrum envelope methods are capable of detecting the oscillation frequency. However, few methods are available for locating the root cause which is the main objective of oscillation diagnosis. This paper proposes a new method to diagnose the root cause of plant-wide oscillations using the adjacency matrix. A novel feature of the new method is that it utilizes the information in the process flowsheet. The method is not data-based and it can be carried out without using any data. However, this method complements the data based methods very well and it is best used in combination with other data-based methods to provide powerful diagnosis of plant-wide oscillations. This paper is the subject of a newly proposed complete procedure for detection and diagnosis of plant-wide oscillation. Two industrial case studies are also presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed procedure. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.