Soft sensor modelling of propylene conversion based on a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy neural network optimized with independent component analysis and mutual information

Propylene conversion is important to economic efficiency in the production of acrylic acid. Hence, the online measurement of propylene conversion is becoming more and more important. The current measurement method is mainly uses an offline meteorological chromatography analyser, which is difficult to measure accurately in real time. A soft sensor modelling method of propylene conversion based on Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy neural network optimized by independent component analysis and mutual information is proposed in this paper. Firstly, fast independent component analysis-based denoising strategy is developed to remove the noise in the measurement of variables influenced by propylene conversion. Then, a mutual information-based variable selection method is proposed to select the key variables from multitudinous variables to reduce the influence of weak correlation. Finally, a T-S fuzzy neural network algorithm is employed to forecast the propylene conversion in the process of propylene oxidation. Simulation results show that the proposed soft sensor modelling method has better prediction accuracy and generalization ability. The method of this paper is obvious and effective.