A Data-Driven Health Prognostics Approach for Steam Turbines Based on Xgboost and DTW

A steam turbine is one of the critical components in a power generation system whose failure may result in unexpected consequences, even catastrophic losses. Thus, the reliability of steam turbines needs to be guaranteed all the time, which requires that its health state can be monitored and predicted effectively. Due to various failure modes, it is difficult to build physics-of-failure models used for health prognostics for steam turbines. In this paper, a data-driven integrated framework for health prognostics for steam turbines, which is based on extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and dynamic time warping (DTW), is proposed. The proposed framework includes two modules: anomaly detection and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. The anomalies refer to the overall abnormal operation of steam turbines. In the process of anomaly detection, the temporal variables which can represent the operating conditions of the considered steam turbine are selected first. Appropriately selected temporal variables can reduce the input dimension and will improve real-time performance. Then, XGBoost is used to detect anomalies based on learning historical data. In the process of RUL prediction, a similarity-based algorithm with DTW is used to gain the RUL by contrasting the measured temporal variables with those in the historical cases. The similarity-based algorithm can predict the RUL without establishing a degradation path model, which can avoid the difficulties in parameter estimation for the degradation model and model generalization. The proposed framework is validated by real case studies from an industrial steam turbine. The results show that the proposed approach can detect the anomalies successfully and predict the RUL effectively.