A stacked denoising sparse autoencoder based fault early warning method for feedwater heater performance degradation

Power grid operation faces severe challenges with the increasing integration of intermittent renewable energies. Hence the steam turbine, which mainly undertakes the task of frequency regulation and peak shaving, always operates under off-design conditions to meet the accommodation demand. This would affect the operation economy and exacerbate the ullage of equipment. The feedwater heater (FWH) plays an important role in unit, whose timely fault early warning is significant in improving the operational reliability of unit. Therefore, this paper proposes a stacked denoising sparse autoencoder (SDSAE) based fault early warning method for FWH. Firstly, the concept of a frequent pattern model is proposed as an indicator of FWH performance evaluation. Then, an SDSAE- back-propagation (BP) based method is introduced to achieve self-adaptive feature reduction and depict nonlinear properties of frequent pattern modeling. By experimenting with actual data, the feasibility and validity of the proposed method are verified. Its detection accuracy reaches 99.58% and 100% for normal and fault data, respectively. Finally, competitive experiments prove the necessity of feature reduction and the superiority of SDSAE based feature reduction compared with traditional methods. This paper puts forward a precise and effective method to serve for FWH fault early warning and refines the key issues to inspire later researchers.