Virtual Sensors in Aero Gas Turbines
A Technology Marvel
- Aero Gas Turbines are an engineering marvel with very high power to weight ratio. It has very high speed shafts (of the order of 15000RPM) with turbines driving compressors facing extreme temperatures
- Operating a Gas Turbine safely and reliably is a challenge faced by gas turbine engineers. Online assessment of health parameters of rotating elements like Compressors, Turbines can play a crucial role in ensuring the health of the engines, failures of which results in massive expenses in the fleet maintenance and in the reduction of reliability
- While rotating sensors in these area are desirable, due to the harsh operating environment, leading to their high mortality rate, jeopardizes the mission safety.
- IVA has developed a unique virtual sensor technology, a digital twin which can potentially save millions and also paving a way to indigenously develop advanced engine health monitoring with diagnostics and prognostics
- This game changing technology has a wide application in the health monitoring of elements working in any hostile environments and not limited to Aerospace and Defense applications. Combined with physics based models of the systems and legacy data, it can predict the complete health of complex systems using minimum number of sensors positioned in relatively safer environment and once established, can potentially generate huge savings in life cycle costs
Introducing Virtual Sensors to preclude multi-sensor prediction and its failure in jet engines, potentially saves the industry billions in life-cycle costs.
Health Monitoring of Oil Pump with
Digital Twin Technology
Real-time monitoring of the pump’s operation, allowing for the identification of potential issues on time
Performance Monitoring
Online monitoring of pump performance by comparing the actual pump and Digital Twin evaluates its degradation in performance overtime
Diagnostics and Prognostics
Oil pumps being a crucial element in engine operations, its digital twin can aid in the diagnostics and prognostics analysis of overall engine health.
Performance evaluation-Simulation of Extreme Operating Conditions
Evaluation of pump performance under extreme operating conditions with digital twin simulation saves time and huge investments in expensive testing.
Reduction of sensors using Virtual Sensor Technology
Virtual sensors can be developed to have the ability to comprehend the connections, between sets of sensor data and the specific measurements they aim to calculate through machine learning techniques. This approach combined with physics models reduces the need for a large number of sensors, since after training the algorithms can accurately estimate real time values of physical quantities solely by utilizing data from the actual sensors installed on the engine. This technique is useful in predicting measurements of hostile environment where sensor mortality rates are high using sensors placed at ‘safe’ zone. This is very valuable and saves in life cycle costs.
Virtual sensors in hostile environments
Virtual sensors have the potential to revolutionize the way that turbojet engines or any equipment which has parameters to be measured in hostile environment for optimum performance, are fine-tuned to provide optimum performance in real-time, monitored, and maintained. By providing accurate and reliable measurements of the key parameters of a turbojet engine in a hostile environment like Combustion chamber temperature profile, Turbine and Compressor blade stress, Oil pressure etc. Virtual sensors can help to improve engine performance, reliability, safety, and fuel efficiency.
Reduce life cycle costs
A potential solution to lower the lifetime expenses of aircraft engines is virtual sensors. Virtual sensors have the potential to significantly increase the financial performance of airlines and other operators of aero engines by optimizing engine performance, lowering maintenance costs, prolonging engine life, and decreasing downtime.
Reliability
Virtual sensors are an invaluable tool for enhancing the reliability of aero engines because of their many advantages, including reduced/Nil failure rates, resilience to harsh environments, scalability, adaptability, and the ability to monitor key components, compensate for sensor drift, and anticipate future issues.
