Fault
detection and diagnosis (FDD) in process industries is an
important task for efficient process monitoring and plant safety.
It is also essential for improving product quality and reducing production
cost by reducing process downtime. Real-time multiscale classification
of faults plays a vital role in process monitoring. However, some
major issues such as high correlation, complexity, and nonlinearity
of data are yet to be addressed. In this paper, a fault diagnosis
approach based on multikernel support vector machines is proposed
to classify the internal and external faults such as reflux failure,
change in reboiler duty, column tray upsets, and change in feed composition,
flow, and temperature in a distillation column. The data set is generated
using Aspen plus dynamics simulation at normal and faulty states.
The classification has been done by various methods such as decision
tree, K-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis, artificial
neural network, subspace discriminant, and multikernel support vector
machine. It is observed that the SVM based diagnostic system provides
more accurate root cause isolation. The proposed MK-SVM method was
evaluated by using the confusion matrix as the performance evaluator.
The result showed that the proposed model has a high FDR which is
99.77% and a very low FAR, i.e., 0.23%.