A review of vibration monitoring as a diagnostic tool for turbine blade faults

Vibration monitoring is widely recognized as an effective tool for the detection and diagnosis of incipient failures of gas turbines. This paper presents a review of vibration based methods for turbine blade faults. Methods typically involved analysis of blade passing frequencies, and extraction of dynamic signals from the measured vibration response. This includes frequency analysis, wavelet analysis, neural networks and fuzzy logic and model based analysis. The literature reviewed showed that vibration could detect most types of blade faults on the basis that dynamic signals are correctly extracted using the most appropriate signal processing method