A new sensor fault diagnosis method based on structured kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is proposed for nonlinear processes.By performing KPCA on subsets of variables,a set of structured residuals,i.e.,scaled powers of KPCA,can be obtained in the same way as partial PCA.The structured residuals are utilized in composing an isolation scheme for sensor fault diagnosis,according to a properly designed incidence matrix.Sensor fault sensitivity and critical sensitivity are defined,based on which an incidence matrix optimization algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the structured KPCA.The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on the simulated continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) process.