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

Gas turbine aero-engines real time on-board modelling: A review, research challenges, and exploring the future

On-board real time modelling for gas turbine aero-engines has been extensively used for engine performance improvement and reliability. This has been achieved by the utilization of on-board model for the engine's control and health management. This paper offers a historical review of on-board modelling applied on gas turbine engines and it also establishes its limitations, and consequently the challenges, which should be addressed to apply the on-board real time model to new and the next generation gas turbine aero-engines. For both applications, i.e. engine control and health management, claims and limitations are analysed via numerical simulation and publicly available data. Regarding the former, the methods for modelling clean and degraded engines are comprehensively covered. For the latter, the techniques for the component performance tracking and sensor/actuator diagnosis are critically reviewed. As an outcome of this systematic examination, two remaining research challenges have been identified: firstly, the requirement of a high-fidelity on-board modelling over the engine life cycle, especially for safety-critical control parameters during rapid transients; secondly, the dependability and reliability of on-board model, which is critical for the engine protection in case of on-board model failure. Multiple model-based on-board modelling and runtime assurance are proposed as potential solutions for the identified challenges and their potential and effectiveness are discussed in detail

Integration of On-Line and Off-Line Diagnostic Algorithms for Aircraft Engine Health Management

This paper investigates the integration of on-line and off-line diagnostic algorithms for aircraft gas turbine engines. The on-line diagnostic algorithm is designed for in-flight fault detection. It continuously monitors engine outputs for anomalous signatures induced by faults. The off-line diagnostic algorithm is designed to track engine health degradation over the lifetime of an engine. It estimates engine health degradation periodically over the course of the engine s life. The estimate generated by the off-line algorithm is used to update the on-line algorithm. Through this integration, the on-line algorithm becomes aware of engine health degradation, and its effectiveness to detect faults can be maintained while the engine continues to degrade. The benefit of this integration is investigated in a simulation environment using a nonlinear engine model

Robust sensor fault detection and isolation of gas turbine engines

An effective fault detection and isolation (FDI) technology can play a crucial role in improving the system availability, safety and reliability as well as reducing the risks of catastrophic failures. In this thesis, the robust sensor FDI problem of gas turbine engines is investigated and different novel techniques are developed to address the effects of parameter uncertainties, disturbances as well as process and measurement noise on the performance of FDI strategies. The efficiencies of proposed techniques are investigated through extensive simulation studies for the single spool gas turbine engine that is previously developed and validated using the GSP software. The gas turbine engine health degradation is considered in various forms in this thesis. First, it is considered as a part of the engine dynamics that is estimated off-line and updated periodically for the on-board engine model. Second, it is modeled as the time-varying norm-bounded parameter uncertainty that affects all the system state-space matrices and third as an unknown nonlinear dynamic that is approximated by the use of a dynamic recurrent neural network. In the first part of the thesis, we propose a hybrid Kalman filter (HKF) scheme that consists of a single nonlinear on-board engine model (OBEM) augmented with piecewise linear (PWL) models constituting as the multiple model (MM) based estimators to cover the entire engine operating regime. We have integrated the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR)-based method with our MM-based scheme to estimate the sensor fault severity under various single and concurrent fault scenarios. In order to ensure the reliability of our proposed HKF-based FDI scheme during the engine life cycle, it is assumed that the reference baselines are periodically updated for the OBEM health parameters. In the second part of the thesis, a novel robust sensor FDI strategy using the MM-based approach is proposed that remains robust with respect to both time-varying parameter uncertainties and process and measurement noise. The scheme is composed of robust Kalman filters (RKF) that are constructed for multiple PWL models. The parameter uncertainty is modeled by using a time-varying norm bounded admissible structure that affects all the PWL state space matrices. The robust Kalman filter gain matrices are designed by solving two algebraic Riccati equations (ARE) that are expressed as two linear matrix inequality (LMI) feasibility conditions. The main objective is to propose a robust filter that satisfies the overall performance requirements and is not affected by system perturbations. The requirements include a quadratically stable filter that ensures bounded estimation error variances having predefined values. In the third part of the thesis, a novel hybrid approach is proposed to improve the robustness of FDI scheme with respect to different sources of uncertainties. For this purpose, a dynamic recurrent neural network (DRNN) is designed to approximate the gas turbine engine uncertainty due to the health degradations. The proposed DRNN is trained offline by using the extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm for an engine with different levels of uncertainty, but with healthy sensors. The convergence of EKF-based DRNN training algorithm is also investigated. Then, the trained DRNN with the fixed parameters and topology is integrated with our online model-based FDI algorithm to approximate the uncertainty terms of the real engine. In this part, the previously proposed HKF and RKF are integrated with the trained DRNN to construct the hybrid FDI structure

Exploring Prognostic and Diagnostic Techniques for Jet Engine Health Monitoring: A Review of Degradation Mechanisms and Advanced Prediction Strategies

Maintenance is crucial for aircraft engines because of the demanding conditions to which they are exposed during operation. A proper maintenance plan is essential for ensuring safe flights and prolonging the life of the engines. It also plays a major role in managing costs for aeronautical companies. Various forms of degradation can affect different engine components. To optimize cost management, modern maintenance plans utilize diagnostic and prognostic techniques, such as Engine Health Monitoring (EHM), which assesses the health of the engine based on monitored parameters. In recent years, various EHM systems have been developed utilizing computational techniques. These algorithms are often enhanced by utilizing data reduction and noise filtering tools, which help to minimize computational time and efforts, and to improve performance by reducing noise from sensor data. This paper discusses the various mechanisms that lead to the degradation of aircraft engine components and the impact on engine performance. Additionally, it provides an overview of the most commonly used data reduction and diagnostic and prognostic techniques

Multidimensional prognostics for rotating machinery: A review

open access articleDetermining prognosis for rotating machinery could potentially reduce maintenance costs and improve safety and avail- ability. Complex rotating machines are usually equipped with multiple sensors, which enable the development of multidi- mensional prognostic models. By considering the possible synergy among different sensor signals, multivariate models may provide more accurate prognosis than those using single-source information. Consequently, numerous research papers focusing on the theoretical considerations and practical implementations of multivariate prognostic models have been published in the last decade. However, only a limited number of review papers have been written on the subject. This article focuses on multidimensional prognostic models that have been applied to predict the failures of rotating machinery with multiple sensors. The theory and basic functioning of these techniques, their relative merits and draw- backs and how these models have been used to predict the remnant life of a machine are discussed in detail. Furthermore, this article summarizes the rotating machines to which these models have been applied and discusses future research challenges. The authors also provide seven evaluation criteria that can be used to compare the reviewed techniques. By reviewing the models reported in the literature, this article provides a guide for researchers considering prognosis options for multi-sensor rotating equipment

Fault diagnostics for advanced cycle marine gas turbine using genetic algorithm

The major challenges faced by the gas turbine industry, for both the users and the manufacturers, is the reduction in life cycle costs , as well as the safe and efficient running of gas turbines. In view of the above, it would be advantageous to have a diagnostics system capable of reliably detecting component faults (even though limited to gas path components) in a quantitative marmer. V This thesis presents the development an integrated fault diagnostics model for identifying shifts in component performance and sensor faults using advanced concepts in genetic algorithm. The diagnostics model operates in three distinct stages. The rst stage uses response surfaces for computing objective functions to increase the exploration potential of the search space while easing the computational burden. The second stage uses the heuristics modification of genetics algorithm parameters through a master-slave type configuration. The third stage uses the elitist model concept in genetic algorithm to preserve the accuracy of the solution in the face of randomness. The above fault diagnostics model has been integrated with a nested neural network to form a hybrid diagnostics model. The nested neural network is employed as a pre- processor or lter to reduce the number of fault classes to be explored by the genetic algorithm based diagnostics model. The hybrid model improves the accuracy, reliability and consistency of the results obtained. In addition signicant improvements in the total run time have also been observed. The advanced cycle Intercooled Recuperated WR2l engine has been used as the test engine for implementing the diagnostics model.SOE Prize winne

Fault Diagnosis of Gas Turbine Engines by Using Multiple Model Approach

The field of fault detection and isolation (FDI) has attracted much attention in control theory during the last three decades which has resulted in development of sophisticated FDI algorithms. However, increasing the complexity of FDI algorithms is not necessarily feasible. Particularly for on-line FDI, the FDI unit must have the minimum possible computation cost to prevent any long delays in fault detection. In this research, we try to address the FDI problem of a single spool jet engine by using a modified linear multiple model (MM). We first develop a novel symbolic computation-based method for linearization purposes such that the obtained linear models are subjected to the symbolic fault variables. By substituting certain values for these symbolic variables, one can obtain different linear models, which describe mathematically the healthy and faulty models. In order to select the operating point, we use this fact that for a given constant fuel flow (W_f), the system reaches a steady state, that is varying for different values of W_f. Therefore, the operating points for linearization can be determined by the level of the Power Level Angel (PLA) (different values of W_f). These operating points are selected such that an observer, which is designed as a candidate for the healthy mode, can accurately estimates the states of the system in healthy scenario and the number of false alarm then would be kept to minimum. If the system works at different operating points one can then discretize the W_f into different intervals such that in each interval a linear model represents the behavior of the original system. By using the obtained models for different operating points, one designs the corresponding FDI units. Second, we provide a modified multiple model (MM) approach to investigate the FDI problem of a single spool jet engine. The main advantage of this method lies in the fact that the proposed MM consists of a certain set of linear Kalman filter banks rather than using nonlinear Kalman filters such as the Extended Kalman Filter which requires more computational cost. Moreover, a hierarchical structural multiple model is used to detect and isolate multiple faults. The simulation results show the capability of the proposed method when it is applied to a single spool jet engine model