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A Flexible Automatic Test System for Rotating Turbine Machinery

The widespread applications of rotating machines such as turbine machinery in both industry and commercial life require advanced technologies to efficiently and effectively test their operational status before they begin their practical productions in the plant. This chapter discusses the development of a general flexible automatic test system for turbine machinery. In order to meet the demanding test requirements for a large and diverse community of turbine machinery, the proposed automatic test system has a contemporary windows interface and a graphical interaction and can be easily configured to include functions required by current and emerging test demands. The design and implementation of such a test system is approached from an object-oriented (OO) software engineering point-of-view for ease of extension, expansion, and maintenance. Practical implementation upon a real industrial plant shows the validity and effectiveness of the implemented automatic test system for improving the performance and quality of turbine machinery. The obtained test system delivers the performance to meet all rigorous test throughput requirements.

12.1 INTRODUCTION

Turbine machinery is a type of common equipment for industrial plants. Maintenance costs associated with unprogrammed shutdown of machines like turbo-compressors or generators are normally high, which often demands interruption of the entire production. Moreover, hazardous accidents and equipment failures always result in environmental pollution and poor product quality, and they jeopardize the safety of equipment and human resources. Therefore, a performance test of the turbine machinery must be carried out thoroughly before the machines leave the factory to ensure their safe and reliable operation in future. Furthermore, the early detection of the mechanical deficiencies in a machine also allows the machine developers to re-examine the principle and design of turbine machinery so that its performance can be improved in a timely manner.

So far, a variety of automatic test systems (ATS) have been developed to test the performance of turbine machinery [1]. The systems of such kind have shown that they can bring significant benefits to industries. However, those systems are mostly designed for certain specific turbine types. The source codes of the test system have to be revised if any changes of system configurations and functions are needed. In other words, such systems are lack of generality and flexibility, which are not able to meet the current and emerging test demands for an increasingly large and diverse community of turbine machinery types. The lack of general-purpose software has been the primary barrier for low-cost and easy-to-use ATS [1]. Despite the power of modern software engineering, it still remains a rather large customization process for any specific test applications. Therefore, there is a result of developing a flexible test software to accommodate various test applications. The expected end results are lower ATS costs with more power and rapid inclusion of innovations.

Consequently, today's automatic test applications place demanding requirements on software; therefore the proposed automatic test system should provide customers with the diverse capabilities to handle even the most sophisticated applications. This chapter thus presents an effective Flexible Automatic Test System for Turbine Machinery (FATSFTM). The software in our test system builds on a variety of latest standard technologies such as reconfiguration technology, database management, virtual instruments (VIs), object-oriented software engineering, ActiveX Automation, and the Internet so as to provide an open test platform delivering ease of use, power, and flexibility. The design goals and design strategies for FATSFTM are presented in Section 12.2 and Section 12.3, respectively. The detailed development process of the test system is discussed in Section 12.4. Section 12.5 discusses functions of FATSFTM. On-site implementation and field experience are presented in Section 12.6. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 12.7.