A method based on Analytical Hierarchy Process for generator fault diagnosis

Power generator is the most important equipment in power system, and the security and reliability of power system are influenced by its running status. Generators failure or generators break down can cause high financial consequences. For this reason, several concepts for the condition monitoring of generators have been developed. Large volume of available data from monitoring systems can overwhelm personnel and require extensive interpretation. Correctly handling this information requires expertise in generator design, operating limits, alarm processing and interpretation. Because expertise is often a scarce quantity, decisions must often be made when expert group is unavailable. The purpose of this article is to collect significant generator data in order to form a comprehensive analysis by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The AHP is a multi criteria analysis approach, where is used in order to combine the results of diagnostic methods and draw conclusions on the most probable failure. A fault diagnosis structure has been designed and several comparison charts have been generated. As a case study characteristics of a generator have been analyzed using Expert Choice (EC) software. The EC results confirmed high performance of AHP method for utilizing in generator fault diagnosis.