Sensor placement for post-combustion CO2 capture plants

The process monitoring and control of post-combustion CO2 capture plants (PCCPs) is crucial. In this work, we address the problem of sensor placement for PCCPs and propose a computationally efficient method to perform sensor placement. The objective is to determine the (near)optimal set of sensors that maximizes the degree of observability for state estimation while satisfying the budget constraint. Specifically, we resort to the information contained in the sensitivity matrix calculated around the operating region of a PCCP to quantify the degree of observability of the states corresponding to the placed sensors. The sensor placement problem is formulated as an optimization problem, and solved efficiently through a one-by-one removal approach based on the sensitivity analysis. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be applicable through simulations.