CONTROLLER WITH NEURAL NETWORK FOR ESTIMATING GAS TURBINE INTERNAL CYCLE PARAMETERS

A gas turbine control system includes a controller that is coupled to actuator systems that govern operation of the gas turbine. The controller includes a processor for generating respective actuator control signals in correspondence with a plurality of turbine operating condition signals; the controller includes at least one neural network estimator that is trained to generate an estimated turbine operating condition signal. The neural network estimator typically has one or more hidden neuron layers that are coupled together in a feedforward structure, a recurrent neural network architecture. The estimated turbine operating condition signal generated by the neural network estimator typically, but not necessarily, represents a turbine internal cycle operating parameter for which the turbine has no corresponding operating parameter sensor.