Distillation Tower Fouling Prediction: Anomaly Detection & Causality Analysis Using Process Health Solution (PHS)

Liberty Barney, Data Scientist, Ascend Performance Materials

Distillation tower fouling plagued Ascend’s operations forcing an unplanned 11 day downtime. The team used Seeq coupled with Seeq ML to identify key fouling contributors. This work has allowed Ascend to operationalize an ML model to provide a 60 day lead time in maintenance planning and propose operational optimization to extend run time between cleaning events.