A New Gas Path Fault Diagnostic Method of Gas Turbine Based on Support Vector Machine

Abstract

As a crucial section of gas turbine maintenance decision-making process, to date, gas path fault diagnostic has gained a lot of attention. However, model-based diagnostic methods, like non-linear gas path analysis (GPA) and genetic algorithms, need an accurate gas turbine model, and diagnostic methods without gas turbine model, like artificial neural networks, need a large number of experimental data. Both are difficult to gain. Support vector machine (SVM), a novel computational learning method with excellent performance, seems to be a good choice for gas path fault diagnostic of gas turbine without engine model. In this paper, SVM is employed to diagnose a deteriorated gas turbine. And the diagnostic result of SVM is compared to the result of artificial neural networks. The comparing result confirms that SVM has an obvious advantage over artificial neural networks method based on a small sample of data, and can be employed to gas path fault diagnostic of gas turbine. Additionally, SVM with radial basis kernel function is the best choice for gas turbine gas path fault diagnostic based on small sample.