Prediction of Steam Turbine Blade Erosion Using Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation Data and Hierarchical Machine Learning

The information of the degree of blade erosion is vital for the efficient operation of steam turbines. However, it is nearly impossible to directly measure the degree of blade erosion during operation. Moreover, collecting sufficient data of eroded cases for predictive analysis is challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a blade erosion prediction method using numerical simulation and machine learning. Pressure data of several blade erosion cases are collected from the numerical turbine simulation. The machine learning approach involves training on collected simulation data to predict the degree of erosion for the first-stage stator (1S) and the first-stage rotor blade (1R) from internal pressure data. The proposed erosion prediction model employs a two-step hierarchical approach. First, the proposed model predicts the 1S erosion degree using the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) regression. Second, the proposed model estimates the 1R erosion degree with linear regression models. These models are tailored for each of the 1S erosion degrees, utilizing pressure data processed through fast Fourier transform (FFT). The evaluation shows that the proposed method achieves the prediction of the 1S erosion with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.000693 mm and the 1R erosion with an MAE of 0.458 mm. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method can accurately capture the degree of turbine blade erosion from internal pressure data. As a result, the proposed method suggests that the erosion prediction method can be effectively used to determine the optimal timing for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO).