Intelligent Combined Neural Network and Kernel Principal Component Analysis Tool for Engine Health Monitoring Purposes

An efficient maintenance plan is an important aspect for aeronautical companies to increase flight safety and decrease costs. Modern technologies are widely used in the Engine Health Monitoring (EHM) discipline to develop intelligent tools capable of monitoring the health status of engines. In this work, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and in-detail Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNNs) were exploited in addition to a Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) to design an intelligent diagnostic tool capable of predicting the Performance Parameters (PPs) of the main components used as their health index. For this purpose, appropriate datasets containing information about degraded engines were generated using the Gas Turbine Simulation Program (GSP). Finally, the original datasets and the reduced datasets obtained after the application of KPCA to the original datasets were both used in the training and testing process of neural networks, and results were compared. The goal was to obtain a reliable intelligent tool useful for diagnostic purposes. The study showed that the degraded component detection and estimation of its performance achieved by using the hybrid KPCA–FFNNs were predicted with accurate and reliable performance, as demonstrated through detailed quantitative confusion matrix analysis.