General Electric Company
Signal response monitoring for turbine engines

Abstract:

A turbomachine control system that includes signal monitoring features is provided. Particularly, the control system proactively isolates or discards unresponsive sensed signals to prevent them from being used to control the turbomachine. The control system can detect and discard unresponsive signals and can utilize a healthier signal or a model of the expected sensor response instead to avert undesirable events, such as e.g., a loss of thrust control event. In one example aspect, the control system includes one or more computing devices that receive a sensed signal. The variance of the sensed signal is determined and then compared to an expected variance of the signal. The expected variance can be output by a sensor model of the one or more computing devices. A variance ratio is determined and the output is compared to a predefined threshold. If the output of the variance threshold exceeds the predefined threshold, then the signal is classified as unresponsive.