Intelligent Thermal Imaging-Based Diagnostics of Turbojet Engines

Abstract

There are only a few applications of infrared thermal imaging in aviation. In the area of turbojet engines, infrared imaging has been used to detect temperature field anomalies in order to identify structural defects in the materials of engine casings or other engine parts. In aviation applications, the evaluation of infrared images is usually performed manually by an expert. This paper deals with the design of an automatic intelligent system which evaluates the technical state and diagnoses a turbojet engine during its operation based on infrared thermal (IRT) images. A hybrid system interconnecting a self-organizing feature map and an expert system is designed for this purpose. A Kohonen neural network (the self-organizing feature map) is successfully applied to segment IRT images of a turbojet engine with high precision, and the expert system is then used to create diagnostic information from the segmented images. This paper represents a proof of concept of this hybrid system using data from a small iSTC-21v turbojet engine operating in laboratory conditions.

Keywords

• expert systems
• infrared thermography
• intelligent diagnostics
• image segmentation
• neural networks
• thermal imaging camera
• turbojet engines