Blade fault diagnosis using artificial intelligence technique

Blade fault diagnosis is conventionally based on interpretation of vibration spectrum and wavelet map. These methods are however found to be difficult and subjective as it requires visual interpretation of chart and wavelet color map. To overcome this problem, important features for blade fault diagnosis in a multi row of rotor blade system was selected to develop a novel blade fault diagnosis method based on artificial intelligence techniques to reduce subjective interpretation. Three artificial neural network models were developed to detect blade fault, classify the type of blade fault, and locate the blade fault location. An experimental study was conducted to simulate different types of blade faults involving blade rubbing, loss of blade part, and twisted blade. Vibration signals for all blade fault conditions were measured with a sampling rate of 5 kHz under steady-state conditions at a constant rotating speed. Continuous wavelet transform was used to analyse the vibration signals and its results were used subsequently for feature extraction. Statistical features were extracted from the continuous wavelet coefficients of the rotor operating frequency and its corresponding blade passing frequencies. The extracted statistical features were grouped into three different feature sets. In addition, two new feature sets were proposed: blade statistical curve area and blade statistical summation. The effectiveness of the five different feature sets for blade fault detection, classification, and localisation was investigated. Classification results showed that the statistical features extracted from the operating frequency to be more effective for blade fault detection, classification, and localisation than the statistical features from blade passing frequencies. Feature sets of blade statistical curve area was found to be more effective for blade fault classification, while feature sets of blade statistical summation were more effective for blade fault localisation. The application of feature selection using genetic algorithm showed good accuracy performance with fewer features achieved. The neural network developed for blade fault detection, classification, and localisation achieved accuracy of 100%, 98.15% and 83.47% respectively. With the developed blade fault diagnosis methods, manual interpretation solely dependent on knowledge and the experience of individuals can be reduced. The novel methods can therefore be used as an alternative method for blade fault diagnosis

Artificial neural networks and physical modeling for determination of baseline consumption of CHP plants

An effective modeling technique is proposed for determining baseline energy consumption in the industry. A CHP plant is considered in the study that was subjected to a retrofit, which consisted of the implementation of some energy-saving measures. This study aims to recreate the post-retrofit energy consumption and production of the system in case it would be operating in its past configuration (before retrofit) i.e., the current consumption and production in the event that no energy-saving measures had been implemented. Two different modeling methodologies are applied to the CHP plant: thermodynamic modeling and artificial neural networks (ANN). Satisfactory results are obtained with both modeling techniques. Acceptable accuracy levels of prediction are detected, confirming good capability of the models for predicting plant behavior and their suitability for baseline energy consumption determining purposes. High level of robustness is observed for ANN against uncertainty affecting measured values of variables used as input in the models. The study demonstrates ANN great potential for assessing baseline consumption in energyintensive industry. Application of ANN technique would also help to overcome the limited availability of on-shelf thermodynamic software for modeling all specific typologies of existing industrial processes

A Review on Expert System Applications in Power Plants

The control and monitoring of power generation plants is being complicated day by day, with the increase size and capacity of equipments involved in power generation process. This calls for the presence of experienced and well trained operators for decision making and management of various plant related activities. Scarcity of well trained and experienced plant operators is one of the major problems faced by modern power industry. Application of artificial intelligence techniques, especially expert systems whose main characteristics is to simulate expert plant operator’s actions is one of the actively researched areas in the field of plant automation. This paper presents an overview of various expert system applications in power generation plants. It points out technological advancement of expert system technology and its integration with various types of modern techniques such as fuzzy, neural network, machine vision and data acquisition systems. Expert system can significantly reduce the work load on plant operators and experts, and act as an expert for plant fault diagnosis and maintenance. Various other applications include data processing, alarm reduction, schedule optimisation, operator training and evaluation. The review point out that integration of modern techniques such as neural network, fuzzy, machine vision, data base, simulators etc. with conventional rule based methodologies have added greater dimensions to problem solving capabilities of an expert system.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v4i1.502

Artificial Neural Network and its Applications in the Energy Sector – An Overview

In order to realize the goal of optimal use of energy sources and cleaner environment at a minimal cost, researchers; field professionals; and industrialists have identified the expediency of harnessing the computational benefits provided by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This article provides an overview of AI, chronological blueprints of the emergence of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and some of its applications in the energy sector. This short survey reveals that despite the initial hiccups at the developmental stages of ANNs, ANN has tremendously evolved, is still evolving and have been found to be effective in handling highly complex problems even in the areas of modeling, control, and optimization, to mention a few

A robust PID autotuning method for steam/water loop in large scale ships

During the voyage of the ship, disturbances from the sea dynamics are frequently changing, and the ship's operation mode is also varied. Hence, it is necessary to have a good controller for steam/water loop, as the control task is becoming more challenging in large scale ships. In this paper, a robust proportional-integral-derivative (PID) autotuning method is presented and applied to the steam/water loop based on single sine tests for every sub-loop in the steam/water loop. The controller is obtained during which the user-defined robustness margins are guaranteed. Its performance is compared against other PID autotuners, and results indicate its superiority

A Review of using Data Mining Techniques in Power Plants

Data mining techniques and their applications have developed rapidly during the last two decades. This paper reviews application of data mining techniques in power systems, specially in power plants, through a survey of literature between the year 2000 and 2015. Keyword indices, articles’ abstracts and conclusions were used to classify more than 86 articles about application of data mining in power plants, from many academic journals and research centers. Because this paper concerns about application of data mining in power plants; the paper started by providing a brief introduction about data mining and power systems to give the reader better vision about these two different disciplines. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the collected articles and classifies them according to three categories: the used techniques, the problem and the application area. From this review we found that data mining techniques (classification, regression, clustering and association rules) could be used to solve many types of problems in power plants, like predicting the amount of generated power, failure prediction, failure diagnosis, failure detection and many others. Also there is no standard technique that could be used for a specific problem. Application of data mining in power plants is a rich research area and still needs more exploration

Performance-based health monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics for condition-based maintenance of gas turbines: A review

With the privatization and intense competition that characterize the volatile energy sector, the gas turbine industry currently faces new challenges of increasing operational flexibility, reducing operating costs, improving reliability and availability while mitigating the environmental impact. In this complex, changing sector, the gas turbine community could address a set of these challenges by further development of high fidelity, more accurate and computationally efficient engine health assessment, diagnostic and prognostic systems. Recent studies have shown that engine gas-path performance monitoring still remains the cornerstone for making informed decisions in operation and maintenance of gas turbines. This paper offers a systematic review of recently developed engine performance monitoring, diagnostic and prognostic techniques. The inception of performance monitoring and its evolution over time, techniques used to establish a high-quality dataset using engine model performance adaptation, and effects of computationally intelligent techniques on promoting the implementation of engine fault diagnosis are reviewed. Moreover, recent developments in prognostics techniques designed to enhance the maintenance decision-making scheme and main causes of gas turbine performance deterioration are discussed to facilitate the fault identification module. The article aims to organize, evaluate and identify patterns and trends in the literature as well as recognize research gaps and recommend new research areas in the field of gas turbine performance-based monitoring. The presented insightful concepts provide experts, students or novice researchers and decision-makers working in the area of gas turbine engines with the state of the art for performance-based condition monitoring

Dynamic Modeling, Sensor Placement Design, and Fault Diagnosis of Nuclear Desalination Systems

Fault diagnosis of sensors, devices, and equipment is an important topic in the nuclear industry for effective and continuous operation of nuclear power plants. All the fault diagnostic approaches depend critically on the sensors that measure important process variables. Whenever a process encounters a fault, the effect of the fault is propagated to some or all the process variables. The ability of the sensor network to detect and isolate failure modes and anomalous conditions is crucial for the effectiveness of a fault detection and isolation (FDI) system. However, the emphasis of most fault diagnostic approaches found in the literature is primarily on the procedures for performing FDI using a given set of sensors. Little attention has been given to actual sensor allocation for achieving the efficient FDI performance. This dissertation presents a graph-based approach that serves as a solution for the optimization of sensor placement to ensure the observability of faults, as well as the fault resolution to a maximum possible extent. This would potentially facilitate an automated sensor allocation procedure. Principal component analysis (PCA), a multivariate data-driven technique, is used to capture the relationships in the data, and to fit a hyper-plane to the data. The fault directions for different fault scenarios are obtained from the prediction errors, and fault isolation is then accomplished using new projections on these fault directions. The effectiveness of the use of an optimal sensor set versus a reduced set for fault detection and isolation is demonstrated using this technique. Among a variety of desalination technologies, the multi-stage flash (MSF) processes contribute substantially to the desalinating capacity in the world. In this dissertation, both steady-state and dynamic simulation models of a MSF desalination plant are developed. The dynamic MSF model is coupled with a previously developed International Reactor Innovative and Secure (IRIS) model in the SIMULINK environment. The developed sensor placement design and fault diagnostic methods are illustrated with application to the coupled nuclear desalination system. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly developed integrated approach to performance monitoring and fault diagnosis with optimized sensor placement for large industrial systems

Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes

The book documents 25 papers collected from the Special Issue “Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes”, highlighting recent research trends in complex industrial processes. The book aims to stimulate the research field and be of benefit to readers from both academic institutes and industrial sectors