An Open Approach to Condition Monitoring, Diagnosis and Decision Support Systems

Abstract

In increasing the availability and reducing the maintenance costs of gasturbines in critical applications, there has been an increasing trend towards Condition Monitoring, Diagnostic and Decision Support systems (CMD&D). The idea is to reduce the number of routine preventative maintenance procedures, in favor of techniques that continuously monitor the health and diagnose faults as they develop. Early isolation of the root cause of problems, allows the operators to better plan the corrective maintenance actions, taking into account the gasturbine and the other units with which it collaborates. Clearly, this requires expertise in many fields such as Data Acquisition, Trending, Aerothermodynamic Performance, Vibration, Emissions, Fault Isolation, etc. In addition, it is increasingly becoming expensive to have experts available at all locations, so the solution obviously lies in (Semi-)autonomous systems. Their task would be to monitor the health and diagnose symptoms of machinery, perhaps in collaboration with junior experts locally and senior experts at a remote center. This report outlines some of the results of a short but broad technical exploration in the questions of why none of the existing packages have achieved widespread acceptance, and how a turbine control manufacturer can play a significant role. A conceptual solution is presented which can meet the challenging functionality, data abstraction, automation and communication requirements by integration of expertise and modules from different groups. However, details on how to turn the concept into a product have been puposely ommitted in order to safeguard proprietory activity.