Smart engine - A gas turbine fault diagnostics and life management tool

Given the maturity of the gas turbine user industry, and the quality of the original equipment manufactured, the field experience of these machines has been broadly very good. Nonetheless, there can be difficulties in managing availability and reliability, and the costs of unscheduled shut downs can be extremely large. Advanced gas turbine performance management offers opportunities in improving availability, reliability and productivity, driving down life cycle costs as well as adding to safety and compliance. This paper describes in detail the development of an engine fault diagnostics tool by the authors. The authors focus on structure, functionality as well as possible benefits of its use. The first part describes the structure and various methodologies adopted in the development of the system and the second part of the work describes the system and its salient features. The primary goal at this point of time was to test the utility, functionality and robustness of the presented tool, interesting and relevant results are obtained. Due to space limitations we restrict ourselves to discussing the system and not go into the details of actual simulation runs.