Automatic Processing of Air Gap Monitoring Signals in Hydro-Generators
Résumé
Compact turbines are often designed at the cost of a small air gap which can lead to rotor-stator collisions. Such
accidents lead to a temporary halt in production, can cause collateral damage and are very expensive to repair.
Air gap monitoring is therefore the best solution to predict and prevent such collisions.
Due to recent industry needs, we consider the case of stator deformation with dynamic rotor eccentricity. If the
literature in the field of air gap monitoring is rich in sensor instrumentation, it is rather poor in signal processing,
especially for the case of stator deformation. In this work, we take a first step to fill this gap and propose a
solution to automatically process the recorded signals. After showing how to obtain clean usable signals, we
present two main results. (1) We show how to compute the stator profile by correcting the eccentricity of the
measured air gap, which is useful for long-term maintenance. (2) For each point of the stator, we calculate
the critical air gap that corresponds to its closest position to the rotor which is essential to protect the turbine
in real time. We also propose visualizations that can be interpreted by experts in the field who have no prior
knowledge of the techniques used.
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