Blade material fatigue assessment using Elman Neural Networks

Material degradation evaluation and life prediction of major components such as blades, rotors, valves of steam turbines not only guarantees reliable, efficient and continuous operation of electric plants, but also offers the promise of substantially reducing the cost of repair and replacement of defective parts, and may even result in saving lives. In this paper, a recurrent neural network based strategy was developed for material degradation assessment and fatigue damage propagation prediction. Two Elman Neural Networks were developed for fatigue severity assessment and trend prediction correspondingly. The performance of the proposed prognostic methodology was evaluated by using blade material fatigue data collected from a material testing system. The prognostic method is found to be a reliable and robust material fatigue predictor.