Fault Detection and Identification in an Acid Gas Removal Unit Using Deep Autoencoders.

An acid gas removal unit (AGRU) in a natural gas processing plant is designed specifically to remove acidic components, such as carbon dioxide (CO) and hydrogen sulfide (HS), from the natural gas. The occurrence of faults, such as foaming, and to a lesser extent, damaged trays and fouling, in AGRUs is a commonly encountered problem; however, they are the least studied in the open literature. Hence, in this paper, shallow and deep sparse autoencoders with SoftMax layers are investigated to facilitate early detection of these three faults before any significant financial loss.