Predictive Study of Flame status inside a combustor of a gas turbine using binary classification

Abstract: Quick and accurate detection of flame inside a gas turbine is very crucial to mitigaterisks in power generation. Failure of flame detection increases downtime and maintenancecosts and on rare occasions it may cause explosions due to buildup of incombustible fuel inside the combustion chamber.The aim of this thesis is to investigate the applicability ofmachine learning methods to detect the presence of flame within a gas turbine. Traditionally,this is done using an optical flame detection which converts the infrared radiation toa differential reading, which is further converted as a digital signal to the control systemand gives the flame status (1 for flame ON and 0 for flame OFF). The primary purpose ofthis alternative flame detection method is to reduce the instrument cost per gas turbine. Amachine learning model is trained with the data collected over several runs of the turbineengine and would estimate if there is an occurrence of the flame, to decide if the machineshould be ON or OFF. To reduce the instrumentation cost, the presented flame predictionmethod based on deep learning methods is employed, which takes standard data such as dynamic pressure and temperature values as input. These variables are observed to have a high correlation with the flame status. The pressure is measured using a piezocryst sensorand the temperature is measured using a thermocouple. A Study is performed by trainingon several machine learning models and coming up with which model among them have worked the best on this data.The Logistic is used as a baseline and is compared with othermodels such as KNN,SVM,Naïve Bayes,RandomForest and XGBoost is trained with thedata collected over several runs of the turbine and tested on to predict flame status insidethe gas turbine.It was observed that KNN and Random Forest performed exceptionallywell as compared to the baseline model. It is recorded that the minimum time for estimation of the flame status by the machine is 0.6 seconds and if the model implementedcan give a high accuracy with the same time then the proposed method can be an effective alternate flame detection method.