Abstract
Prognosis, or the forecasting of remaining operational life of a component, is a fundamental step for predictive maintenance of turbomachines. While diagnostics gives important information on the current conditions of the engine, it is through prognostics that a suitable maintenance interval can be determined, which is critical to minimize costs. However, mature prognostic models are still lacking in industry, which still heavily relies on human experience or generic statistical quantifications. Predicting future conditions is very challenging due to many factors that introduce significant uncertainty, including unknown future machine operations, interaction between multiple faults, and inherent errors in diagnostic and prognostic models. Given the importance to quantify this uncertainty and its impact on operational decisions, this work presents an information fusion approach for gas turbine prognostics. Condition monitoring performed by a Bayesian network is fused with a particle filter for prognosis of gas turbine degradation, and the effect of diagnostic models uncertainty on the prognosis are estimated through probabilistic analysis. Gradual and rapid degradation are simulated on a gas turbine performance model and the impact of sensor noise and initial conditions for the particle filter estimation are assessed. This work demonstrates that the combination of Bayesian networks and particle filters can give good results for short-term prognosis.
