The invention relates to a penicillin fermentation process failure monitoring method based on recursive kernel principal component analysis (RKPCA), which belongs to the technical field of failure monitoring and diagnosis. The method comprises the following steps: acquiring the ventilation rate, stirrer power, substrate feed rate, substrate feed temperature, generated heat quantity, concentrationof dissolved oxygen, pH value and concentration of carbon dioxide; and establishing an initial monitoring model by using the first N numbered standardized samples, updating the model by a RKPCA method, and computing the characteristic vectors to detect and diagnose the failure in the process of continuous annealing, wherein when the T2 statistics and SPE statistics exceed the respective control limit, judging that a failure exists, and otherwise, judging that the whole process is normal. The method mainly solves the problems of data nonlinearity and time variability; and the RKPCA method is used for updating the model by carrying out recursive computation on the characteristic values and characteristic vectors of the training data covariance. The result indicates that the method can greatly reduce the false alarm rate and enhance the failure detection accuracy.