Condition Monitoring, Instrumentation and Control

Chairman

Vision

25,000 hours of gas turbine operation without intervention

Background

There are many different types of condition monitoring techniques and systems which can be applied to monitor a gas turbine. There are also many different ways to design and implement a control system. These condition monitoring systems and control architectures are designed with certain objectives and goals, including machine protection and safety, and support of condition and periodic maintenance strategies.

The instrumentation and control systems need to be more reliable so that single point instrument problems do not cause a machine trip. Control system architecture needs to be restructured and developed to provide robust, reliable and safe operation of a gas turbine when instrumentation or control system faults occur. The working group will investigate the possibility to deploy condition monitoring technologies from other industries. Finally, one important task is the development of reliable decision support software to allow machine degradation to be reliably predicted and monitored.

Research Areas

The main target is the development of new technology to allow the running periods of machine components to be extended to meet the work group objective. Following priority research areas have been identified:

• Replacement of boroscope inspection (such as pyrometer)
• Avoid offline water wash
• Control and measurement of emissions
• Damage detection and monitoring of components
• Management of hot gas path components
• Fault tolerant control