Design of Nonlinear Sensor Networks for Process Plants

In this article we extend and generalize the ideas of two previous articles devoted to linear sensor networks to nonlinear systems. In those previous articles the use of cutsets and a decomposition procedure were proposed and proved efficient to solve large scale linear problems. In this article we show that a similar procedure, now based on a variable elimination scheme, can be also used efficiently for medium size nonlinear problems, but its computational efficiency for realistic large scale problems is not satisfactory. We also propose an alternative technique for the case of tree enumeration using instruments instead of equations that is very efficient for heavily instrumented flowsheets.