Rotor blade fracture is one of the main failure modes of gas turbines.It is of great significance to study the vibration features and diagnosis methods for the blade fracture failure to ensure the safe and reliable operation of gas turbines.The transmission path of the blade vibration response and the variation law of the wake excitation force were studied based on the generation mechanism of blade wake excitation force.A vibration response model for stator blades was established in order to derive the variation of the rotor blade vibration response after blade fracture failure.Then according to the response features of blade passing frequency and fundamental frequency components, a fault identification method for blade fracture was proposed based on an improved heuristic segmentation algorithm（IHSA）, which can realize the fault type judgment and timely warning of blade fracture.Furthermore, the identification factor γ for estimating the blade fracture position was introduced according to the features of vibration responses and the principle of actual gas turbine’s operation and control.The identification of fracture position was realized by comparing the γ values of blades at different stages of the same rotor.Finally, a fault diagnosis method for blade fracture in a gas turbine’s compressor was proposed combining the above mentioned fault identification method and fracture location estimation method.The effectiveness of the vibration features and the diagnosis method in engineering application was verified by analyzing a gas turbine fault case.