The use of Bayesian Networks in Detecting the States of Ventilation Mills in Power Plants

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to present a new method of predictive maintenance which can detect the states of coal grinding mills in thermal power plants using Bayesian networks. Several possible structures of Bayesian networks are proposed for solving this problem and one of them is implemented and tested on an actual system. This method uses acoustic signals and statistical signal pre-processing tools to compute the inputs of the Bayesian network. After that the network is trained and tested using signals measured in the vicinity of the mill in the period of 2 months. The goal of this algorithm is to increase the efficiency of the coal grinding process and reduce the maintenance cost by eliminating the unnecessary maintenance checks of the system.

Keywords

• ventilation mills
• predictive maintenance
• Bayesian networks
• acoustic signals