Thermoeconomic Diagnosis Applied to the Transient Operation of a Microturbine
The use of thermoeconomic analysis for the diagnosis of malfunctions causing efficiency reductions in energy systems has been widely discussed in the literature. The main objectives of thermoeconomic procedures are to discover malfunctions, locate the components where they have taken place, help one to identify the possible causes and quantify the impact in terms of additional energy resource consumption. In this paper, thermoeconomic diagnosis is applied to discover possible malfunctions of a microturbine. The procedure consists in the use of compact productive models of the components, which relate their exergetic products to their resources. Two different types of productive models are used: linear model and non linear model. The latter is built using neural networks. The main interest in the proposed application is that transient operation of the system is investigated. Results show that diagnosis can be performed both in steady state and transient conditions. The neural network model allows one to detect the anomaly with better accuracy than the linear model.