The design of a decision support system for the vibration monitoring of turbine generators

Condition monitoring (CM) systems monitor the health of expensive plant items such as turbine generators. They interpret turbine parameters by signaling an alarm when pre-defined limits are breached. Often these alarms have no further operational consequence but still require investigation by an expert. This is a time consuming and laborious process due to the volume of data interpreted for each alarm. In order to reduce the burden of alarm assessment, a decision support system (DSS) is proposed. The DSS features a routine alarm assessment (RAA) module which provides an initial analysis of the alarms, highlighting those with no further operational consequence and enabling the expert to focus on those which indicate a genuine problem with the turbine. The structured approach taken to capture and document the expert knowledge on RAA along with the generation of a module specification and the selected IS techniques are outlined. The implementation of an RAA prototype is discussed along with how this acts as a foundation for a full alarm interpretation and fault diagnostic system.