Fault Diagnosis System for the Outokumpu Flash Smelting Process

Fault diagnosis systems have attracted growing interest in a number of engineering fields. The number of applications has increased and successful results have been widely reported. The fault diagnosis system presented in this paper is integrated, and it monitors the states of the process and performs fault detection and diagnosis on the process equipment. The monitoring of process states is carried out by means of Kohonen Self-Organising Maps that is a powerful tool in visualisation and analysis of high dimensional data in engineering applications. This paper presents the results of SOM analysis carried out on the Outokumpu flash smelting process. The subsystems analyzed in more detail are the condition of the concentrate burner, the condition of the gas line on the basis of the pressure distribution in the process and the cooling water circulation of the waste heat boiler, and the condition of the furnace and furnace equipment on the basis of the temperature distribution in the furnace and gas line. Keywords: Fault diagnosis, Process monitoring, Kohonen Self-Organising Maps, flash smelting