A Preliminary Fault Detection Methodology for Abnormal Distillation Column Operations Using Acoustic Signals

The fault detection of the chemical equipment operation process is an effective means to ensure safe production. In this study, an acoustic signal processing technique and a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification algorithm were combined to identify the running states of the distillation columns. This method can accurately identify various fluid flow states in distillation columns, including normal and flooding states. First, the acoustic signals were collected under normal and abnormal states in an experimental distillation column. Then, the method of dual-domain feature extraction was used to extract the features such as the energy ratio and linear prediction coefficient (LPC). Moreover, the extracted feature parameters were analyzed and compared in a general way. Finally, the k-NN model was used to classify the acoustic signals. The results show that this method had high identification accuracy and provided an important reference for further research.