A fault propagates along physical paths until it reaches the boundary of the equipment or system, which shows as a functional failure. Hence, inferring the fault propagation helps to ensure the normal operation of the industrial system. To infer the fault propagation in the steam turbine system, a graph model is developed. Firstly, a process graph topology is constructed according to the system mechanism, whose nodes and edges represent the equipment and mutual relationships. Meanwhile, a fault graph topology is built, in which nodes indicate potential faults and edges are inferred propagation paths. Then, the representations of fault nodes are realized through a graph neural network. Lastly, link prediction methods based on nodes’ representations are conducted, along with the paths inference results. Consequently, the accuracy of fault propagation inference for the steam turbine system is over 86%.

The control valve is an important piece of equipment in the steam turbine, which frequently suffers from the fault of the dead zone. The graph model is a promising method for dead zone detection, yet establishing an accurate and completed graph topology is not an easy task due to limited mechanism knowledge. Hence, a graph model is proposed to predict the links in the graph and estimate the relationship between variables of related equipment of the control valve. The graph convolution is conducted on the uncompleted graph to learn the low-level representations of the graph nodes, and the score function is used to evaluate the probability of the existence of links between a pair of graph nodes. Results demonstrate a test accuracy of 99.2% for the link prediction, and follow the principles of thermodynamics in the steam turbine. Consequently, the proposed graph model is capable of estimating the relationships for the steam turbine control valve, and other inter-connected industrial systems.