Prognostics and health management for maintenance practitioners - Review, implementation and tools evaluation.

In literature, prognostics and health management (PHM) systems have been studied by many researchers from many different engineering fields to increase system reliability, availability, safety and to reduce the maintenance cost of engineering assets. Many works conducted in PHM research concentrate on designing robust and accurate models to assess the health state of components for particular applications to support decision making. Models which involve mathematical interpretations, assumptions and approximations make PHM hard to understand and implement in real world applications, especially by maintenance practitioners in industry. Prior knowledge to implement PHM in complex systems is crucial to building highly reliable systems. To fill this gap and motivate industry practitioners, this paper attempts to provide a comprehensive review on PHM domain and discusses important issues on uncertainty quantification, implementation aspects next to prognostics feature and tool evaluation. In this paper, PHM implementation steps consists of; (1) critical component analysis, (2) appropriate sensor selection for condition monitoring (CM), (3) prognostics feature evaluation under data analysis and (4) prognostics methodology and tool evaluation matrices derived from PHM literature. Besides PHM implementation aspects, this paper also reviews previous and on-going research in high-speed train bogies to highlight problems faced in train industry and emphasize the significance of PHM for further investigations

Design Optimization of Wind Energy Conversion Systems with Applications

Modern and larger horizontal-axis wind turbines with power capacity reaching 15 MW and rotors of more than 235-meter diameter are under continuous development for the merit of minimizing the unit cost of energy production (total annual cost/annual energy produced). Such valuable advances in this competitive source of clean energy have made numerous research contributions in developing wind industry technologies worldwide. This book provides important information on the optimum design of wind energy conversion systems (WECS) with a comprehensive and self-contained handling of design fundamentals of wind turbines. Section I deals with optimal production of energy, multi-disciplinary optimization of wind turbines, aerodynamic and structural dynamic optimization and aeroelasticity of the rotating blades. Section II considers operational monitoring, reliability and optimal control of wind turbine components

Operational modal analysis and prediction of remaining useful life for rotating machinery

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe significance of rotating machinery spans areas from household items to vital industry sectors, such as aerospace, automotive, railway, sea transport, resource extraction, and manufacturing. Hence, our technologised society depends on efficient and reliable operation of rotating machinery. To contribute to this aim, this thesis leverages measurable quantities during its operation for structural-mechanical evaluation employing Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) and the prediction of Remaining Useful Life (RUL). Modal parameters determined by OMA are central for the design, test, and validation of rotating machinery. This thesis introduces the first open parametric simulation dataset of rotating machinery during an acceleration run. As there is a lack of similar open datasets suitable for OMA, it lays a foundation for improved reproducibility and comparability of future research. Based on this, the Averaged Order-Based Modal Analysis (AOBMA) method is developed. The novel addition of scaling and weighted averaging of individual machine orders in AOBMA alleviates the analysis effort of the existing Order-Based Modal Analysis (OBMA) method by providing a unified set of modal parameters with higher accuracy. As such, AOBMA showed a lower mean absolute relative error of 0.03 for damping ratio estimations across compared modes while OBMA provided an error value of 0.32 depending on the processed order. At excitation with high harmonic contributions, AOBMA also resulted in the highest number of accurately identified modes among the compared methods. At a harmonic ratio of 0.8, for example, AOBMA identified an average of 11.9 modes per estimation, while OBMA and baseline OMA followed with 9.5 and 9 modes, respectively. Moreover, it is the first study, which systematically evaluates the impact of excitation conditions on the compared methods and finds an advantage of OBMA and AOBMA over traditional OMA regarding mode shape estimation accuracy. While OMA can be used to evaluate significant structural changes, Machine Learning (ML) methods have seen substantially greater success in condition monitoring, including RUL prediction. However, as these methods often require large amounts of time and cost- intensive training data, a novel data-efficient RUL prediction methodology is introduced, taking advantage of distinct healthy and faulty condition data. When the number of training sequences from an open dataset is reduced to 5%, an average prediction Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 24.9 operation cycles is achieved, outperforming the baseline method with an RMSE of 28.1. Motivated by environmental considerations, the impact of data reduction on the training duration of several method variants is quantified. When the full training set is utilised, the most resource-saving variant of the proposed approach achieves an average training duration of 8.9% compared to the baseline method

Predictive Modeling of a Two-stage Gearbox towards Fault Detection

This research presents a systematic approach to health monitoring using dynamic gearbox models (DGM) and the harmonic wavelet transforms (HWT) for vibration response analysis. A comprehensive DGM is developed, the model parameters are identified through correlated numerical and experimental investigations, and HWT analysis is performed to illustrate the fault detection and diagnosis procedure and capability of this approach. The model fidelity is validated first by spectrum analysis, using constant speed experimental data, and secondly by HWT analysis, using non-stationary experimental data. The comparison confirms that both the frequency content and the predicted, relative response magnitudes match with physical measurements. Model prediction and experimental data are compared for healthy gear operation and seeded gear faults including a pinion with a missing tooth, tooth root crack, tooth spall and varying tooth chip severities, demonstrating that fault type and severity are distinguishable. The research shows fault modeling in combination with HWT data analysis is able to identify fault types, evaluate fault relative severity, and greatly reduce pattern recognition library development. This approach can facilitate successful fault detection, diagnosis and prognosis for gearbox systems, providing a physically meaningful connection of fault indicators to the actual fault patterns thus paving the way to real-time condition monitoring

Systems Engineering: Availability and Reliability

Current trends in Industry 4.0 are largely related to issues of reliability and availability. As a result of these trends and the complexity of engineering systems, research and development in this area needs to focus on new solutions in the integration of intelligent machines or systems, with an emphasis on changes in production processes aimed at increasing production efficiency or equipment reliability. The emergence of innovative technologies and new business models based on innovation, cooperation networks, and the enhancement of endogenous resources is assumed to be a strong contribution to the development of competitive economies all around the world. Innovation and engineering, focused on sustainability, reliability, and availability of resources, have a key role in this context. The scope of this Special Issue is closely associated to that of the ICIE’2020 conference. This conference and journal’s Special Issue is to present current innovations and engineering achievements of top world scientists and industrial practitioners in the thematic areas related to reliability and risk assessment, innovations in maintenance strategies, production process scheduling, management and maintenance or systems analysis, simulation, design and modelling