A comparative study of data-driven and physics-based gas turbine fault recognition approaches

The present paper compares the fault recognition capabilities of two gas turbine diagnostic approaches: data-driven and physics-based (a.k.a. gas path analysis, GPA). The comparison takes into consideration two differences between the approaches, the type of diagnostic space and diagnostic decision rule. To that end, two stages are proposed. In the first one, a data-driven approach with an artificial neural network (ANN) that recognizes faults in the space of measurement deviations is compared with a hybrid GPA approach that employs the same type of ANN to recognize faults in the space of estimated fault parameter. Different case studies for both anomaly detection and fault identification are proposed to evaluate the diagnostic spaces. They are formed by varying the classification, type of diagnostic analysis, and deviation noise scheme. In the second stage, the original GPA is reconstructed replacing the ANN with a tolerance-based rule to make diagnostic decisions. Here, two aspects are under analysis: the comparison of GPA classification rules and whole approaches. The results reveal that for simple classifications both spaces are equally accurate for anomaly detection and fault identification. However, for complex scenarios, the data-driven approach provides on average slightly better results for fault identification. The use of a hybrid GPA with ANN for a full classification instead of an original GPA with tolerance-based rule causes an increase of 12.49% in recognition accuracy for fault identification and up to 54.39% for anomaly detection. As for the whole approach comparison, the application of a data-driven approach instead of the original GPA can lead to an improvement of 12.14% and 53.26% in recognition accuracy for fault identification and anomaly detection, respectively.