A continuous stirred tank reactor simulator for fault diagnosis experiments.

Fault diagnosis in technical systems is an essential discipline in engineering. Appropriate simulation software tools provide a crucial didactic infrastructure to perform research, studying the multidimensional process state in case of malfunctioning of the operational state of the process. This work presents a fully documented simulator of a chemical process, a Continuously Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR). The simulator is a considerably improved model of a benchmark process based on two chemical engineering doctoral theses. Contrary to the popular Tennessee-Eastman simulator and other publicly available simulators, the work presented here allows a profound understanding of the process and the implications of faults. The principal aim is to provide a research-oriented experimental platform for model-based and model-free fault detection and diagnosis where the model faults are easily configured and analyzable. It provides a better alternative to the Tennessee-Eastman software, with the same level of nonlinear complexity and a completely transparent and documented process model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]