TIGER/sup TM/: intelligent continuous monitoring of gas turbines

Gas turbines are one of the prime providers of power for many modern industrial plants. They are critical for power generation and the critical power provider at many modern chemical and process plants. It is vital that these gas turbines work at optimum efficiency and with high availability. The paper discusses the TIGER gas turbine monitoring system. TIGER is a software system that receives over 600 measurements at once per second intervals directly from the controller of a gas turbine, and using an innovative combination of artificial intelligence techniques, automatically makes an assessment of the condition of the gas turbine, just as the best human expert would. It includes extensive diagnostics to identify the cause of any small deviations or failures, as well as the cause of any major trips.