A gas turbine diagnostic approach with transient measurements.

Most gas turbine performance analysis based diagnostic methods use the information from steady state measurements. Unfortunately, steady state measurement may not be obtained easily in some situations, and some types of gas turbine fault contribute little to performance deviation at steady state operating conditions but significantly during transient processes. Therefore, gas turbine diagnostics with transient measurement is superior to that with steady state measurement. In this paper, an accumulated deviation is defined for gas turbine performance parameters in order to measure the level of performance deviation during transient processes. The features of the accumulated deviation are analysed and compared with traditionally defined performance deviation at a steady state condition. A non-linear model based diagnostic method, combined with a genetic algorithm (GA), is developed and applied to a model gas turbine engine to diagnose engine faults by using the accumulated deviation obtained from transient measurement. Typical transient measurable parameters of gas turbine engines are used for fault diagnostics, and a typical slam acceleration process from idle to maximum power is chosen in the analysis. The developed diagnostic approach is applied to the model engine implanted with three typical single-component faults and is shown to be very successful.