Condition monitoring has traditionally been deployed for the monitoring of a single component, such as a rotating electrical machine. The application of condition monitoring to an entire process plant has not yet received much attention. In this work we outline the challenges associated with plant-wide condition monitoring, and explore the possibility of using energy as the parameter of interest. The use of energy mitigates the multi-domain monitoring problem, and could also provide a hierarchical view of the process plant's condition. A simple chemical reactor is considered and it is shown that the energy parameter can be used to perform condition monitoring of such a reactor. The identified parameter is also sensitive to time domain variations. This indicates that the concept of using energy flows as the parameter of interest for process-wide condition monitoring applications has merit.
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