Dynamic Health Monitoring of Aero-Engine Gas-Path System Based on SFA-GMM-BID

This paper proposes a dynamic health monitoring method for aero-engines by extracting more hidden information from the raw values of gas-path parameters based on slow feature analysis (SFA) and the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to improve the capability of detecting gas-path faults of aero-engines. First, an SFA algorithm is used to process the raw values of gas-path parameters, extracting the effective features reflecting the slow variation of the gas-path state. Then, a GMM is established based on the slow features of the target aero-engine in a normal state to measure its health status. Moreover, an indicator based on the Bayesian inference distance (BID) is constructed to quantitatively characterize the performance degradation degree of the target aero-engine. Considering that the fixed threshold does not suit the time-varying characteristics of the gas-path state, a dynamic threshold based on the maximum information coefficient is designed for aero-engine health monitoring. The proposed method is verified using a set of actual operation data of a certain aero-engine. The results show that the proposed method can better reflect the degradation process of the aero-engine and identify aero-engine anomalies earlier than other aero-engine fault detection methods. In addition, the dynamic threshold can reduce the occurrence of false alarms. All these advantages give the proposed method high value in real-world applications.