An adaptive online safety assessment method for mechanical system with pre-warning function

The safety status of a dynamic mechanical system is determined by its historical, current and future states together. Therefore the safety assessment process of such system should have dynamic and diachronic characteristics, which helps to track the dynamic states of system and predict future probable danger in advance. In order to overcome the disadvantages of traditional static safety assessment approaches, the results from which are often delayed and prone to produce false alarms, an adaptive online safety assessment method is proposed in this paper, which consists of two steps. A dynamic adaptive weighting method is first introduced and an aggregation scheme based on "3-D" time perspective is further presented to integrate system's historical, current and future safety performance in a unit framework, considering both of assessment and pre-warning functions. The proposed method is able to track and predict the safety status of system dynamically and discover the potential fault in time. Its feasibility and benefits are investigated with a field case study of gas turbine compressor system, which validates that the proposed method improves the accuracy of safety assessment in dynamic conditions, and finally helps to restrain the fault symptom by proactive maintenance successfully. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.