Study of the fault diagnosis method for gas turbine sensors based on inter-parameter coupling information

Abstract Correct and reliable measurement data are crucial for state monitoring, safe operations, health assessment, and life prediction of integrated energy systems (IESs). Sensors are often installed in harsh environments and prone to all kinds of faults; therefore, it is necessary to diagnose sensor faults. A diagnostic method for sensor faults based on gradient histogram distribution (GHD) combined with light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) is presented in this paper. This proposed method effectively utilizes the coupling information between the relevant parameters. The GHD efficiently extracted the time-domain characteristics of sensor faults and reduced the dimension of eigenvectors. This is beneficial to increasing the diagnostic speed. The kernel density estimation distributions of the gradient and eigenvectors for the sensor with strong correlation are similar, but that for the sensor with weak correlation are completely different. A LightGBM classifier trained based on the feature vectors was utilized to diagnose and classify the sensor faults. The diagnosis accuracy and the diagnosis time of this developed method were examined using the multiple-condition practical operation data of gas turbines in the IES. The experiment results demonstrate that the diagnostic accuracy of five sensor faults using this developed method is all above 90%. The diagnostic time is about 0.47–1.34 s, and is less than 2 s for the gradual faults.