Gas turbine sensor loop availability driven fall back strategies design

The design of a new heavy duty gas turbine may imply the exploitation of well proven, as well as, of new sensing technologies and approaches. Nevertheless a key driving point in bringing on the market some innovation resides in the opportunity to implement a flexible sensing system able to optimize the existing compromise among performance, safety, reliability, availability and maintenance (RAMS) parameters. This problem can be solved addressing the possible fall back strategies in case of single or multiple sensors failures through reliability and availability modeling. In this paper, an approach on the modeling of actual sensor configuration dynamic apportionment is presented by means of phase diagrams representation, with the aim of evaluating the advantages and the drawbacks linked to the choice of a certain sensing configuration despite of the sensor technology and relying on failure modes and failure and repair rates knowledge. The simulation results are presented for three different possible sensors configurations on a selected sensor monitoring chain used in gas turbine systems.