Simultaneous-Fault Diagnosis of Gas Turbine Generator Systems Using a Pairwise-Coupled Probabilistic Classifier

A reliable fault diagnostic system for gas turbine generator system (GTGS), which is complicated and inherent with many types of component faults, is essential to avoid the interruption of electricity supply. However, the GTGS diagnosis faces challenges in terms of the existence of simultaneous-fault diagnosis and high cost in acquiring the exponentially increased simultaneous-fault vibration signals for constructing the diagnostic system. This research proposes a new diagnostic framework combining feature extraction, pairwise-coupled probabilistic classifier, and decision threshold optimization. The feature extraction module adopts wavelet packet transform and time-domain statistical features to extract vibration signal features. Kernel principal component analysis is then applied to further reduce the redundant features. The features of single faults in a simultaneous-fault pattern are extracted and then detected using a probabilistic classifier, namely, pairwise-coupled relevance vector machine, which is trained with single-fault patterns only. Therefore, the training dataset of simultaneous-fault patterns is unnecessary. To optimize the decision threshold, this research proposes to use grid search method which can ensure a global solution as compared with traditional computational intelligence techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed framework performs well for both single-fault and simultaneous-fault diagnosis and is superior to the frameworks without feature extraction and pairwise coupling.