Operational modes detection in industrial gas turbines using an ensemble of clustering methods

Operational modes of a process are described by a number of relevant features that are indicative of the state of the process. Hundreds of sensors continuously collect data in industrial systems, which shows how the relationship between different variables changes over time and identifies different...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bagherzade Ghazvini, Mina, Sànchez-Marrè, Miquel|||0000-0001-9848-5779, Bahilo, Edgar, Angulo Bahón, Cecilio|||0000-0001-9589-8199
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/363011
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/363011
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21238047
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Gas-turbines
Artificial intelligence--Engineering applications
Artificial intelligence
Ensemble of clusters
Clustering
Operational modes
Gas turbine
Turbines de gas
Intel·ligència artificial--Aplicacions a l'enginyeria
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Automàtica i control
Descripción
Sumario:Operational modes of a process are described by a number of relevant features that are indicative of the state of the process. Hundreds of sensors continuously collect data in industrial systems, which shows how the relationship between different variables changes over time and identifies different modes of operation. Gas turbines’ operational modes are usually defined regarding their expected energy production, and most research works either are focused a priori on obtaining these modes solely based on one variable, the active load, or assume a fixed number of states and build up predictive models to classify new situations as belonging to the predefined operational modes. However, in this work, we take into account all available parameters based on sensors’ data because other factors can influence the system status, leading to the identification of a priori unknown operational modes. Furthermore, for gas turbine management, a key issue is to detect these modes using a real-time monitoring system. Our approach is based on using unsupervised machine learning techniques, specifically an ensemble of clusters to discover consistent clusters, which group data into similar groups, and to generate in an automatic way their description. This description, upon interpretation by experts, becomes identified and characterized as operational modes of an industrial process without any kind of a priori bias of what should be the operational modes obtained. Our proposed methodology can discover and identify unknown operational modes through data-driven models. The methodology was tested in our case study with Siemens gas turbine data. From available sensors’ data, clusters descriptions were obtained in an automatic way from aggregated clusters. They improved the quality of partitions tuning one consistency parameter and excluding outlier clusters by defining filtering thresholds. Finally, operational modes and/or sub-operational modes were identified with the interpretation of the clusters description by process experts, who evaluated the results very positively.