Sensor fault detection for industrial gas turbine system by using principal component analysis based y-distance indexes

The paper presents a readily implementable and computationally efficient method for sensor fault detection based upon an extension to principal component analysis (PCA) and y-distance indexes. The proposed extension is applied to system data from a sub-15MW industrial gas turbine, with explanations of the eigenvalue/eigenvector problem and the definition of z-scores and principal component (PC) scores. The y-distance index is introduced to measure the differences between sensor reading datasets. It is shown through use of real-time operational data that in-operation sensor faults can be detected through use of the proposed y-distance indexes. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated through experimental trials on Siemens industrial gas turbines.