An Improved Thermoeconomic Diagnosis Procedure for the Detection of Different Malfunctions of Complex Energy Systems
Diagnosis of energy systems mainly consists of detecting and locating anomalies that cause reduction in the system efficiency or can cause major failures. This is an important task due to its economic implications. The attention is here focused on the anomalies that affect the system efficiency. The problem of their location is not easy to solve, due to some ‘disturbs’ that make propagate the effects of an anomaly throughout the system. These effects are caused by the dependence of the components’ behavior on their operating conditions. Moreover they can be amplified by the intervention of the control system and the variations in ambient conditions, fuel quality and plant load. A technique for highly complex system has been proposed in [1]. This procedure, based on the hypothesis of small malfunctions, consists of the progressive elimination of the disturbs, so that the anomalies could be more clearly highlighted. In this paper, a procedure particularly suitable for the application to operating plants is adopted to overcome the hypothesis of small malfunction. It consists of a combination of two techniques: 1) the use of neural networks for the elimination of the malfunctions [2] induced by the dependence of efficiency of components on the operating conditions and 2) the successive application of the analysis to several operating conditions selected within the plant case history.