A Flexible Automatic Test System for Rotating-Turbine Machinery

Abstract

The widespread applications of rotating machines, such as turbine machinery, in both industry and commercial life requires advanced technologies to efficiently and effectively test their operational status before they begin their practical productions in the plant. This paper discusses the development of a general flexible automatic test system (ATS) for turbine machinery. In order to meet the demanding test requirements for a large and diverse community of turbine machinery, the proposed automatic test system has a contemporary Windows interface, graphical interaction, and can be easily configured to include functions required by current and emerging test demands. The design and implementation of such a test system is approached from an object-oriented (OO) software engineering point of view for ease of operation, expansion, and maintenance. Practical implementation upon a real industrial plant shows the validity and effectiveness of the implemented ATS for improving the performance and quality of turbine machinery. The obtained test system delivers the performance to meet all rigorous test throughput requirements. Software design in the industrial automation arena becomes more challenging nowadays than ever, due to the increasingly complicated industrial processes and more demanding measurement tasks. This paper presents a flexible automatic test system (ATS) for rotating-turbine machinery based on the systematic object-oriented (OO) software engineering. In this OO method, the process of software development is divided into five major phases: requirement capture, analysis, design, programming, and testing. Requirement capture collects both functional and nonfunctional user requirements for developing the intended system. In the analysis phase, the objects in the problem domain are modeled, and the desired system operations are studied. In the design phase, the results obtained from the analysis phase are converted into a form that can be implemented using programming languages. In the design phase, the issues on how the structures are formed and how they collaborate with one another via interfaces are figured out. In the programming phase, the code for realizing the target system is developed. Finally, in the test phase, the system is tested against the specified requirements to ensure its correctness in both functionality and performance aspects. By adopting the OO software-development method, the flexible ATS for turbine machinery software is developed in an efficient manner. Meanwhile, other novel technologies such as configuration, database management, graphical user interface, Internet, multithreaded programming, and ActiveX Automation are all incorporated into the system development. The method discussed in the paper can be easily extended to the development of other software-intensive industrial automation systems.