Fault Diagnosis in Gas Turbines Using a Model-Based Technique

Reliable methods for diagnosing faults and detecting degraded performance in gas turbine engines are continually being sought. In this paper, a model-based technique is applied to the problem of detecting degraded performance in a military turbofan engine from take-off acceleration-type transients. In the past, difficulty has been experienced in isolating the effects of some of the physical processes involved. One such effect is the influence of the bulk metal temperature on the measured engine parameters during large power excursions. It will be shown that the model-based technique provides a simple and convenient way of separating this effect from the faster dynamic components. The important conclusion from this work is that good fault coverage can be gleaned from the resultant pseudo-steady-state gain estimates derived in this way.