Soft sensing modelling based on optimal selection of secondary variables and its application

The composition of the distillation column is a very important quality value in refineries, unfortunately, few hardware sensors are available on-line to measure the distillation compositions. In this paper, a novel method using sensitivity matrix analysis and kernel ridge regression (KRR) to implement on-line soft sensing of distillation compositions is proposed. In this approach, the sensitivity matrix analysis is presented to select the most suitable secondary variables to be used as the soft sensor's input. The KRR is used to build the composition soft sensor. Application to a simulated distillation column demonstrates the effectiveness of the method.