A comprehensive review on blade tip timing-based health monitoring: status and future

Abstract

As a promising way of on-line and non-intrusive blade vibration monitoring, the blade tip-timing (BTT) technique is currently being explored by almost all gas turbine or aero-engine manufacturers as replacing strain gauges. The principle of BTT seems to be simple, but how to make it effective in reality is indeed an interdisciplinary problem. In particular, aeroengines always operate under extremely complex environment, so that the BTT technique still faces many potential challenges. The main purpose of this paper is to review key developments, summarize possible issues and discuss the trends. After the brief introduction of BTT, three main challenges in BTT-based health monitoring are refined. Then developments of BTT probes, signal preprocessing and vibration monitoring are reviewed comprehensively. Finally, detailed prospects are discussed on future directions including but not limited to uncertainty calibration, deep compressed sensing, deep learning, fusion of BTT and blade tip clearance (BTC). In particular, an appeal is made that actual and raw BTT data can be shared in the academic and industrial communities in the future. This paper should provide a quick guide for future newcomers into this field.