Gas Turbine Fault Identification by Fusing Vibration Trending and Gas Path Analysis

A fusion method that utilizes performance data and vibration measurements for gas turbine component fault identification is presented. The proposed method operates during the diagnostic processing of available data (process level) and adopts the principles of certainty factors theory. Both performance and vibration measurements are analyzed separately, in a first step, and their results are transformed into a common form of probabilities. These forms are interweaved, in order to derive a set of possible faulty components prior to deriving a final diagnostic decision. Then, in the second step, a new diagnostic problem is formulated and a final set of faulty health parameters are defined with higher confidence. In the proposed method the non-linear gas path analysis is the core diagnostic method, while information provided by vibration measurements trends is used to narrow the domain of unknown health parameters and lead to a well defined solution. It is shown that the presented technique combines effectively different sources of information, by interpreting them into a common form and may lead to improved and safer diagnosis.