Gas turbine fuel valve diagnostics

To meet increasingly demanding efficiency and environmental requirements, new fuel system designs are needed but these may introduce severe heat management issues. Fuel system temperature is consequently becoming a growing reliability concern. The health monitoring capability under development in this paper is seen as an important element for such systems in the future. This paper develops high fidelity modelling of fuel system degradation phenomena using data from a large-scale experimental apparatus. A Stribeck friction characteristic, modelled by a numerically efficient algorithm, was determined and validated with the collected data. This is used as a credible degradation model for the effects of fuel system degradation. Fusion of the degradation model with a fuel system model enables representative data suitable for fault diagnosis algorithm development to be generated. Fault diagnosis algorithms are developed and tested against the synthetic fault data.