Fault diagnosis and prognosis for fuel supply systems in gas turbine engines

Abstract

This paper introduces a feature-extraction method to characterize gas turbine engine dynamics. The extracted features are used to develop a fault diagnosis and prognosis method for the fuel supply system in gas turbine engines. The engine start-up profiles of the core speed (N2) and the exhaust gas temperature collected with high-speed sampling rate are obtained and processed into a more compact data set by identifying critical-to-characterization instances. The fuzzy-clustering method is applied to the smaller number of parameters, and the fault is detected by differentiating the clusters matching the failures. In this work, the actual flight data collected in the field was used to develop and validate the system, and the results are shown for the test on nine engines that experienced fuel supply system failure. The developed fault diagnosis system detected the failure successfully in all nine cases. For the earliest detection cases, the alarms start to trigger 26 days before the system completely fails and 7 days in advance for the last detection.