Systems and methods for acoustic monitoring of trayed distillation columns

A method for training a model to detect an operational condition of a vessel containing two fluid phases moving past each other, comprising:

• providing a fiber optic cable around an exterior surface of the vessel;
• receiving, from the fiber optic cable at a plurality of locations along the exterior surface of the vessel, time domain data comprising distributed acoustic sensing measurements at a plurality of time steps, wherein the time domain data at each time step is labeled based on the operational condition of the vessel at the time step when the time domain was collected;
• determining the frequency domain data, associated with each of the operational conditions, at each of the plurality of locations based on the time domain data;
• and
• training the model to determine the operational condition of the vessel based on the associations between the frequency domain data and/or the time domain data, and the labeled operational conditions.

A system to determine an operational condition of a vessel containing two fluid phases moving past each other, comprising:

• the vessel;
• a fiber optic cable positioned around an exterior surface of the vessel;
• and
• a control unit configured to:
• receive time domain data comprising distributed acoustic sensing measurements from the fiber optic cable at a plurality of locations along the exterior surface of the vessel;
• determine frequency domain data at each of the plurality of locations based on the time domain data;
• perform an analysis of the frequency domain data and/or the time domain data using a pre-trained model;
• and
• determine the operational condition of the vessel based on the analysis.