Self-Learning Based Centrifugal Compressor Surge Mapping With Computationally Efficient Adaptive Asymmetric Support Vector Machine

When an air compressor is operated at very low flow rate for a given discharge pressure, surge may occur, resulting in large oscillations in pressure and flow in the compressor. To prevent the damage of the compressor, on account of surge, the control strategy employed is typically to operate it below the surge line (a map of the conditions at which surge begins). Surge line is strongly affected by the ambient air conditions. Previous research has developed to derive data-driven surge maps based on an asymmetric support vector machine (ASVM). The ASVM penalizes the surge case with much greater cost to minimize the possibility of undetected surge. This paper concerns the development of adaptive ASVM based self-learning surge map modeling via the combination with signal processing techniques for surge detection. During the actual operation of a compressor after the ASVM based surge map is obtained with historic data, new surge points can be identified with the surge detection methods such as short-time Fourier transform or wavelet transform. The new surge point can be used to update the surge map. However, with increasing number of surge points, the complexity of support vector machine (SVM) would grow dramatically. In order to keep the surge map SVM at a relatively low dimension, an adaptive SVM modeling algorithm is developed to select the minimum set of necessary support vectors in a three-dimension feature space based on Gaussian curvature to guarantee a desirable classification between surge and nonsurge areas. The proposed method is validated by applying the surge test data obtained from a testbed compressor at a manufacturing plant.