A Knowledge Transfer Platform for Fault Diagnosis of Industrial Gas Turbines

The aim of this paper is to introduce the bases of an intelligent fault diagnostic platform, which assists in detecting mechanical failures of Industrial Gas Turbines (IGTs). This comprises an integration of an expert system and its complementary signal processing techniques. The essential characteristic here is not to exclude humans (experts) from the diagnostic process, but rather to transfer their knowledge and experience to a computerized platform. The automated process executed by the computerized platform is to ensure the scalability and consistency in fault diagnosis; while the humans are required to corroborate the transparency and liability of the outcomes. In this paper, a Knowledge Transfer Platform (KTP) is proposed for fault diagnosis of industrial systems. It is then designed and tested for combustion fault diagnosis using field data of IGTs. The preliminary results have revealed the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed scheme, which has the potential to be further extended to a large industrial scale and to different engineering diagnostic applications.