Operational Modes Detection in Industrial Gas Turbines Using an Ensemble of Clustering Methods

Abstract

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.

Anomaly Detection in Gas Turbines Using Outlet Energy Analysis with Cluster-Based Matrix Profile

“…These operational modes represent the states of the gas turbine process. The operational mode labels were derived through an automatic data-driven approach based on an ensemble of clustering methods [72], further validated by gas turbine process experts. The results indicate that the number and characteristics of the detected discords are influenced by the window size used in the analysis.…”

Experimental methods in chemical engineering: Data processing and data usage in decision‐making

“…Table 2 presents the target audience of the software (operators, process engineers, or data scientists) in order to gauge the implementation complexity or ease of use of the algorithms implemented in software. Examples of algorithms to detect operating regimes include unsupervised ML like clustering (variational Bayesian Gaussian mixture, [33] principal component analysis, [34,35] and k-means [36][37][38][39] ), neural networks, [40,41] and classification. [42] Performing operating regime detection using simulation software like CAMSIM Plus is possible but must be configured by process experts.…”

Haulage Cycles Identification for Wheeled Transport in Underground Mine Using Neural Networks

“…Methods utilizing supervised learning, especially neural networks, tend to be more popular [ 19 , 20 ]. However, some unsupervised learning applications can also be found [ 21 ]. In this research, the neural network models (deep and convolutional) were utilized both because their usage in the task of haulage cycle identification has not yet been researched and because they tend to perform better than standard approaches [ 22 ].…”