Probabilistic Prognosis of Non-Planar Fatigue Crack Growth

Quantifying the uncertainty in model parameters for the purpose of damage prognosis can be accomplished utilizing Bayesian inference and damage diagnosis data from sources such as non-destructive evaluation or structural health monitoring. The number of samples required to solve the Bayesian inverse problem through common sampling techniques (e.g., Markov chain Monte Carlo) renders high-fidelity finite element-based damage growth models unusable due to prohibitive computation times. However, these types of models are often the only option when attempting to model complex damage growth in real-world structures. Here, a recently developed high-fidelity crack growth model is used which, when compared to finite element-based modeling, has demonstrated reductions in computation times of three orders of magnitude through the use of surrogate models and machine learning. The model is flexible in that only the expensive computation of the crack driving forces is replaced by the surrogate models, leaving the remaining parameters accessible for uncertainty quantification. A probabilistic prognosis framework incorporating this model is developed and demonstrated for non-planar crack growth in a modified, edge-notched, aluminum tensile specimen. Predictions of remaining useful life are made over time for five updates of the damage diagnosis data, and prognostic metrics are utilized to evaluate the performance of the prognostic framework. Challenges specific to the probabilistic prognosis of non-planar fatigue crack growth are highlighted and discussed in the context of the experimental results

Novel deep cross-domain framework for fault diagnosis or rotary machinery in prognostics and health management

Improving the reliability of engineered systems is a crucial problem in many applications in various engineering fields, such as aerospace, nuclear energy, and water declination industries. This requires efficient and effective system health monitoring methods, including processing and analyzing massive machinery data to detect anomalies and performing diagnosis and prognosis. In recent years, deep learning has been a fast-growing field and has shown promising results for Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) in interpreting condition monitoring signals such as vibration, acoustic emission, and pressure due to its capacity to mine complex representations from raw data. This doctoral research provides a systematic review of state-of-the-art deep learning-based PHM frameworks, an empirical analysis on bearing fault diagnosis benchmarks, and a novel multi-source domain adaptation framework. It emphasizes the most recent trends within the field and presents the benefits and potentials of state-of-the-art deep neural networks for system health management. Besides, the limitations and challenges of the existing technologies are discussed, which leads to opportunities for future research. The empirical study of the benchmarks highlights the evaluation results of the existing models on bearing fault diagnosis benchmark datasets in terms of various performance metrics such as accuracy and training time. The result of the study is very important for comparing or testing new models. A novel multi-source domain adaptation framework for fault diagnosis of rotary machinery is also proposed, which aligns the domains in both feature-level and task-level. The proposed framework transfers the knowledge from multiple labeled source domains into a single unlabeled target domain by reducing the feature distribution discrepancy between the target domain and each source domain. Besides, the model can be easily reduced to a single-source domain adaptation problem. Also, the model can be readily updated to unsupervised domain adaptation problems in other fields such as image classification and image segmentation. Further, the proposed model is modified with a novel conditional weighting mechanism that aligns the class-conditional probability of the domains and reduces the effect of irrelevant source domain which is a critical issue in multi-source domain adaptation algorithms. The experimental verification results show the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art multi-source domain-adaptation models

A Digital Triplet for Utilizing Offline Environments to Train Condition Monitoring Systems for Rolling Element Bearings

Manufacturing competitiveness is related to making a quality product while incurring the lowest costs. Unexpected downtime caused by equipment failure negatively impacts manufacturing competitiveness due to the ensuing defects and delays caused by the downtime. Manufacturers have adopted condition monitoring (CM) techniques to reduce unexpected downtime to augment maintenance strategies. The CM adoption has transitioned maintenance from Breakdown Maintenance (BM) to Condition-Based Maintenance (CbM) to anticipate impending failures and provide maintenance actions before equipment failure. CbM is the umbrella term for maintenance strategies that use condition monitoring techniques such as Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Predictive Maintenance (PdM). Preventive Maintenance involves providing periodic checks based on either time or sensory input. Predictive Maintenance utilizes continuous or periodic sensory inputs to determine the machine health state to predict the equipment failure. The overall goal of the work is to improve bearing diagnostic and prognostic predictions for equipment health by utilizing surrogate systems to generate failure data that represents production equipment failure, thereby providing training data for condition monitoring solutions without waiting for real world failure data. This research seeks to address the challenges of obtaining failure data for CM systems by incorporating a third system into monitoring strategies to create a Digital Triplet (DTr) for condition monitoring to increase the amount of possible data for condition monitoring. Bearings are a critical component in rotational manufacturing systems with wide application to other industries outside of manufacturing, such as energy and defense. The reinvented DTr system considers three components: the physical, surrogate, and digital systems. The physical system represents the real-world application in production that cannot fail. The surrogate system represents a physical component in a test system in an offline environment where data is generated to fill in gaps from data unavailable in the real-world system. The digital system is the CM system, which provides maintenance recommendations based on the ingested data from the real world and surrogate systems. In pursuing the research goal, a comprehensive bearing dataset detailing these four failure modes over different collection operating parameters was created. Subsequently, the collections occurred under different operating conditions, such as speed-varying, load-varying, and steadystate. Different frequency and time measures were used to analyze and identify differentiating criteria between the different failure classes over the differing operating conditions. These empirical observations were recreated using simulations to filter out potential outliers. The outputs of the physical model were combined with knowledge from the empirical observations to create ”spectral deltas” to augment existing bearing data and create new failure data that resemble similar frequency criteria to the original data. The primary verification occurred on a laboratory-bearing test stand. A conjecture is provided on how to scale to a larger system by analyzing a larger system from a local manufacturer. From the subsequent analysis of machine learning diagnosis and prognosis models, the original and augmented bearing data can complement each other during model training. The subsequent data substitution verifies that bearing data collected under different operating conditions and sizes can be substituted between different systems. Ostensibly, the full formulation of the digital triplet system is that bearing data generated at a smaller size can be scaled to train predictive failure models for larger bearing sizes. Future work should consider implementing this method for other systems outside of bearings, such as gears, non-rotational equipment, such as pumps, or even larger complex systems, such as computer numerically controlled machine tools or car engines. In addition, the method and process should not be restricted to only mechanical systems and could be applied to electrical systems, such as batteries. Furthermore, an investigation should consider further data-driven approximations to specific bearing characteristics related to the stiffness and damping parameters needed in modeling. A final consideration is for further investigation into the scalability quantities within the data and how to track these changes through different system levels

Architecting Integrated System Health Management for Airworthiness

Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) has been a new area of research - seeking to provide situational awareness to mission and maintenance operations, and for improved decision-making with increased self-autonomy. This research effort developed an analytic architecture and an associated discrete-event simulation using Arena to investigate the potential benefits of ISHM implementation onboard an UAS. The objective of this research is two-fold: firstly, to achieve continued airworthiness by investigating the potential extension of UAS expected lifetime through ISHM implementation, and secondly, to reduce life cycle costs by implementing a Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) policy with better failure predictions made possible with ISHM. Through a series of design experiments, it was shown that ISHM presented the most cost-effective improvement over baseline systems in situations where the reliability of the UAS is poor (relative to manned systems) and the baseline sensor exhibited poor qualities in terms of missed detection and false alarm rates. From the simulation results of the test scenarios, it was observed that failure occurrence rates, sensor quality characteristics and ISHM performance specifications were significant factors in determining the output responses of the model. The desired outcome of this research seeks to provide potential designers with top-level performance specifications of an ISHM system based on specified airworthiness and maintenance requirements for the envisaged ISHM-enabled UAS

Exploiting Robust Multivariate Statistics and Data Driven Techniques for Prognosis and Health Management

This thesis explores state of the art robust multivariate statistical methods and data driven techniques to holistically perform prognostics and health management (PHM). This provides a means to enable the early detection, diagnosis and prognosis of future asset failures. In this thesis, the developed PHM methodology is applied to wind turbine drive train components, specifically focussed on planetary gearbox bearings and gears. A novel methodology for the identification of relevant time-domain statistical features based upon robust statistical process control charts is presented for high frequency bearing accelerometer data. In total, 28 time-domain statistical features were evaluated for their capabilities as leading indicators of degradation. The results of this analysis describe the extensible multivariate “Moments’ model” for the encapsulation of bearing operational behaviour. This is presented, enabling the early degradation of detection, predictive diagnostics and estimation of remaining useful life (RUL). Following this, an extended physics of failure model based upon low frequency SCADA data for the quantification of wind turbine gearbox condition is described. This extends the state of the art, whilst defining robust performance charts for quantifying component condition. Normalisation against loading of the turbine and transient states based upon empirical data is performed in the bivariate domain, with extensibility into the multivariate domain if necessary. Prognosis of asset condition is found to be possible with the assistance of artificial neural networks in order to provide business intelligence to the planning and scheduling of effective maintenance actions. These multivariate condition models are explored with multivariate distance and similarity metrics for to exploit traditional data mining techniques for tacit knowledge extraction, ensemble diagnosis and prognosis. Estimation of bearing remaining useful life is found to be possible, with the derived technique correlating strongly to bearing life (r = .96

A Comprehensive Review of Digital Twin -- Part 1: Modeling and Twinning Enabling Technologies

As an emerging technology in the era of Industry 4.0, digital twin is gaining unprecedented attention because of its promise to further optimize process design, quality control, health monitoring, decision and policy making, and more, by comprehensively modeling the physical world as a group of interconnected digital models. In a two-part series of papers, we examine the fundamental role of different modeling techniques, twinning enabling technologies, and uncertainty quantification and optimization methods commonly used in digital twins. This first paper presents a thorough literature review of digital twin trends across many disciplines currently pursuing this area of research. Then, digital twin modeling and twinning enabling technologies are further analyzed by classifying them into two main categories: physical-to-virtual, and virtual-to-physical, based on the direction in which data flows. Finally, this paper provides perspectives on the trajectory of digital twin technology over the next decade, and introduces a few emerging areas of research which will likely be of great use in future digital twin research. In part two of this review, the role of uncertainty quantification and optimization are discussed, a battery digital twin is demonstrated, and more perspectives on the future of digital twin are shared

Instrumentation and Control Needs for Reliable Operation of Lunar Base Surface Nuclear Power Systems

As one of the near-term goals of the President's Vision for Space Exploration, establishment of a multi-person lunar base will require high-endurance power systems which are independent of the sun, and can operate without replenishment for several years. These requirements may be obtained using nuclear power systems specifically designed for use on the lunar surface. While it is envisioned that such a system will generally be supervised by humans, some of the evolutions required maybe semi or fully autonomous. The entire base complement for near-term missions may be less than 10 individuals, most or all of which may not be qualified nuclear plant operators and may be off-base for extended periods thus, the need for power system autonomous operation. Startup, shutdown, and load following operations will require the application of advanced control and health management strategies with an emphasis on robust, supervisory, coordinated control of, for example, the nuclear heat source, energy conversion plant (e.g., Brayton Energy Conversion units), and power management system. Autonomous operation implies that, in addition to being capable of automatic response to disturbance input or load changes, the system is also capable of assessing the status of the integrated plant, determining the risk associated with the possible actions, and making a decision as to the action that optimizes system performance while minimizing risk to the mission. Adapting the control to deviations from design conditions and degradation due to component failures will be essential to ensure base inhabitant safety and mission success. Intelligent decisions will have to be made to choose the right set of sensors to provide the data needed to do condition monitoring and fault detection and isolation because of liftoff weight and space limitations, it will not be possible to have an extensive set of instruments as used for earth-based systems. Advanced instrumentation and control technologies will be needed to enable this critical functionality of autonomous operation. It will be imperative to consider instrumentation and control requirements in parallel to system configuration development so as to identify control-related, as well as integrated system-related, problem areas early to avoid potentially expensive work-arounds . This paper presents an overview of the enabling technologies necessary for the development of reliable, autonomous lunar base nuclear power systems with an emphasis on system architectures and off-the-shelf algorithms rather than hardware. Autonomy needs are presented in the context of a hypothetical lunar base nuclear power system. The scenarios and applications presented are hypothetical in nature, based on information from open-literature sources, and only intended to provoke thought and provide motivation for the use of autonomous, intelligent control and diagnostics

SIMILARITY-BASED MULTI-SOURCE TRANSFER LEARNING APPROACH FOR TIME SERIES CLASSIFICATION

This study aims to develop an effective method of classification concerning time series signals for machine state prediction to advance predictive maintenance (PdM). Conventional machine learning (ML) algorithms are widely adopted in PdM, however, most existing methods assume that the training (source) and testing (target) data follow the same distribution, and that labeled data are available in both source and target domains. For real-world PdM applications, the heterogeneity in machine original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), operating conditions, facility environment, and maintenance records collectively lead to heterogeneous distribution for data collected from different machines. This will significantly limit the performance of conventional ML algorithms in PdM. Moreover, labeling data is generally costly and time-consuming. Finally, industrial processes incorporate complex conditions, and unpredictable breakdown modes lead to extreme complexities for PdM. In this study, similarity-based multi-source transfer learning (SiMuS-TL) approach is proposed for real-time classification of time series signals. A new domain, called "mixed domain," is established to model the hidden similarities among the multiple sources and the target. The proposed SiMuS-TL model mainly includes three key steps: 1) learning group-based feature patterns, 2) developing group-based pre-trained models, and 3) weight transferring. The proposed SiMuS-TL model is validated by observing the state of the rotating machinery using a dataset collected on the Skill boss manufacturing system, publicly available standard bearing datasets, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), and Paderborn University (PU) bearing datasets. The results of the performance comparison demonstrate that the proposed SiMuS-TL method outperformed conventional Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Transfer learning with neural networks (TLNN) without similarity-based transfer learning methods