Water Droplet Erosion Life Prediction Method for Steam Turbine Blade Materials Based on Image Recognition and Machine Learning

In this paper, a method for predicting remaining useful life (RUL) of turbine blade under water droplet erosion (WDE) based on image recognition and machine learning is presented. Using the experimental rig for testing the WDE characteristics of materials, the morphology pictures of specimen surface at different times in the process of WDE are collected. According to the data processing method of ASTM-G73 and the cumulative erosion-time curves, the WDE stages of materials is quantitatively divided and the WDE life coefficient (zeta) is defined. The life coefficient (zeta) could be used to calculate the RUL of turbine blades. One convolutional neural network model and three machine learning models are adopted to train and predict the image dataset. Then the training process and feature maps of the Resnet model are studied in detail. It is found that the highest prediction accuracy of the method proposed in this paper can be 0.949, which is considered acceptable to provide reference for turbine overhaul period and blade replacement time.