Health Monitoring of an Auxiliary Power Unit Using a Classification Tree
The objective of this work is to present a method to monitor the health of Auxiliary Power Units (APU) using a Dynamic Computational Model, Gas Path Analysis and Classification and Regression Trees (CART). The main data used to train the CART consists of measurements of the exhaust gas temperature, the bleed pressure and the fuel flow. The proposed method was tested using actual APU data collected from a prototype aircraft. The method succeeded in classifying several relevant fault conditions. The few misclassification errors were found to be due to the insufficiency of the information content of the measurement data. *
A gas turbine diagnostic approach with transient measurements
Abstract Most gas turbine performance analysis based diagnostic methods use the information from steady state measurements. Unfortunately, steady state measurement may not be obtained easily in some situations, and some types of gas turbine fault contribute little to performance deviation at steady state operating conditions but significantly during transient processes. Therefore, gas turbine diagnostics with transient measurement is superior to that with steady state measurement. In this paper, an accumulated deviation is defined for gas turbine performance parameters in order to measure the level of performance deviation during transient processes. The features of the accumulated deviation are analysed and compared with traditionally defined performance deviation at a steady state condition. A non-linear model based diagnostic method, combined with a genetic algorithm (GA), is developed and applied to a model gas turbine engine to diagnose engine faults by using the accumulated deviation obtained from transient measurement. Typical transient measurable parameters of gas turbine engines are used for fault diagnostics, and a typical slam acceleration process from idle to maximum power is chosen in the analysis. The developed diagnostic approach is applied to the model engine implanted with three typical single-component faults and is shown to be very successful.
Characterization of a tube-in-shell thermosyphon heat exchanger for solar water heating
Performance of a double-wall, natural convection, two-pass, tube-in-shell heat exchanger designed for use in a solar water heating system is measured. The heat exchanger is mounted along the length of a solar water storage tank. Flow of cold water on the shell side of the heat exchanger is driven solely by buoyancy forces. Hot side fluid is pumped. Flow rate, pressure drop and temperature data needed for a semi-empirical model of the heat exchanger are obtained. Performance is measured for forced convection, hot side volumetric flow rates of 0.016, 0.032 and 0.079 l/s. Temperature difference between hot and cold fluid at the inlets is varied from 0 to 75 degC. Measured values include thermosyphon and forced flow rates, temperature differences across the beat exchanger, vertical temperature distribution in the storage tank, and pressure drop due to shear on the thermosyphon side of the heat exchanger. Heat exchanger effectiveness and overall heat transfer area product (UA) are calculated. Thermosyphon mass flow rates are on the order of 0.01 kg/s. Although the low flow rates create thermal stratification of the water storage tank, they restrict energy transfer in the heat exchanger.