Artificial Neural Network-Based System Identification for a Single-Shaft Gas Turbine

During recent decades, artificial intelligence has been employed as a powerful tool for identification of complex industrial systems with nonlinear dynamics, such as gas turbines (GT). In this study, a methodology based on artificial neural network (ANN) techniques was developed for offline system identification of a low-power gas turbine. The processed data was obtained from a SIMULINK model of a gas turbine in MATLAB environment. A comprehensive computer program code was generated and run in MATLAB for creating and training different ANN models with feed-forward multilayer perceptron (MLP) structure. The code consisted of various training functions, different number of neurons as well as a variety of transfer (activation) functions for hidden and output layers of the network. It was shown that the optimal model for a two-layer network with MLP structure consisted of 20 neurons in its hidden layer and used trainlm as its training function, as well as tansig and logsid as its transfer functions for the hidden and output layers. It was also observed that trainlm has a superior performance in terms of minimum mean squared error (MSE) compared with each of the other training functions. The resulting model could predict performance of the system with high accuracy. The methodology provides a comprehensive view of the performance of over 18,720 ANN models for system identification of the single-shaft gas turbine. One can use the optimal ANN model from this study when training from real data obtained from this type of GT. This is particularly useful when real data is only available over a limited operational range.