Soft Sensor Transferability between Lines of a Sulfur Recovery Unit

Soft Sensors (SSs) are mathematical models that allow real-time estimation of hard-to-measure variables as a function of easy-to-measure ones in an industrial process, emulating the behavior of existing sensors when they are, for instance, taken off for maintenance. The Sulfur Recovery Unit (SRU) from a refinery is taken in exam. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can capture the nonlinearity of such process but present a high complexity training and a very time-consuming structure optimization. For this reason, strategies to use pre-existing models are here examined by testing the transferability of the SSs between two parallel lines of the process.