Fault detection and diagnosis can improve safety and reliability of gas turbines. Current studies on gas turbine fault detection and diagnosis mainly focus on the case of abundant fault samples. However, fault data are rare or even unavailable for gas turbines, especially newly-run gas turbines. Aiming to realize fault detection with only normal data, this paper proposes the concept of normal pattern group. A group of long-short term memory (LSTM) networks are first used for characterizing the mapping relationships among measurable parameters of healthy three-shaft gas turbines. Experiments show that the proposed method can detect all 13 common gas path faults of three-shaft gas turbines sensitively while remaining low false alarm rate. Comparison experiment with single normal pattern model verifies the necessaries and superiorities of using normal pattern group. Meanwhile, comparison between LSTM network and other methods including support vector regression, single-layer feedforward neural network, extreme learning machine and Elman recurrent neural network verifies the superiorities of LSTM network in fault detection. Furthermore, comparison experiment with four common one-class classifiers further verifies the superiorities of the proposed method. This also indicates the superiorities of data-driven methods and gas turbine principle fusion to some extent.

As one of the core components of gas turbines, the combustion system operates in a high-temperature and high-pressure adverse environment, which makes it extremely prone to faults and catastrophic accidents. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the combustion system to detect in a timely way whether its performance has deteriorated, to improve the safety and economy of gas turbine operation. However, the combustor outlet temperature is so high that conventional sensors cannot work in such a harsh environment for a long time. In practical application, temperature thermocouples distributed at the turbine outlet are used to monitor the exhaust gas temperature (EGT) to indirectly monitor the performance of the combustion system, but, the EGT is not only affected by faults but also influenced by many interference factors, such as ambient conditions, operating conditions, rotation and mixing of uneven hot gas, performance degradation of compressor, etc., which will reduce the sensitivity and reliability of fault detection. For this reason, many scholars have devoted themselves to the research of combustion system fault detection and proposed many excellent methods. However, few studies have compared these methods. This paper will introduce the main methods of combustion system fault detection and select current mainstream methods for analysis. And a circumferential temperature distribution model of gas turbine is established to simulate the EGT profile when a fault is coupled with interference factors, then use the simulation data to compare the detection results of selected methods. Besides, the comparison results are verified by the actual operation data of a gas turbine. Finally, through comparative research and mechanism analysis, the study points out a more suitable method for gas turbine combustion system fault detection and proposes possible development directions.