Purified terephthalic acid (PTA) is an important chemical raw material. P-xylene (PX) is transformed to terephthalic acid (TA) through oxidation process and TA is refined to produce PTA. The PX oxidation reaction is a complex process involving three-phase reaction of gas, liquid and solid. To monitor the process and to improve the product quality, as well as to visualize the fault type clearly, a fault diagnosis method based on self-organizing map (SOM) and high dimensional feature extraction method, local tangent space alignment (LTSA), is proposed. In this method, LTSA can reduce the dimension and keep the topology information simultaneously, and SOM distinguishes various states on the output map. Monitoring results of PX oxidation reaction process indicate that the LTSA-SOM can well detect and visualize the fault type. (C) 2015 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.