General Electric Company
Indirect monitoring of aircraft combustor dynamics

Abstract:

Systems and methods for indirect monitoring of combustor dynamics in a gas turbine engine include collecting vibration data acquired by a vibration sensor, which is mounted proximate to an operational component positioned relative to a combustor of a gas turbine engine. The vibration data can be transformed into a frequency domain representation at periodic intervals. The relative signal strength of the vibration data can be determined over the one or more identified frequency bands. The relative signal strength can be adjusted with hysteresis at each of the one or more identified frequency bands. Occurrence of a combustor dynamics event at one or more specific resonant frequencies can be determined based at least in part on evaluation of the adjusted relative signal strength relative to one or more event detection threshold levels.