A VIRTUAL CONTINUOUS EMISSION MONITORING SYSTEM WITH SENSOR VALIDATION WITH A SENSOR EFFICIENCY NETWORK

摘要

A continuous release material inspection system for a manufacturing plant (10) comprising a control system (16) having a virtual sensor network (18) associated with a control system (16).;The network 18 is a prediction network that receives both sensor values and control values for the plant 10 as inputs. The network 18 is operable to map the input via the storage notation for the plant 10 to output the predicted contamination sensor level.;The predicted contamination sensor level is essentially a prediction of the actual contamination sensor level that can be measured by the contamination sensor 14. The network 18 is a replacement for the contamination sensor 14 and thus provides a virtual sensor. The sensor values from the plant 10 are first processed through the sensor validation system 22. The sensor validation system 22 is operable to determine which sensor is out of the tolerance range and thus replaces the input to the virtual sensor network 18 with a predictive output that falls within an acceptable margin range.