ADVANCES IN SYSTEM RELIABILITY-BASED DESIGN AND PROGNOSTICS AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT (PHM) FOR SYSTEM RESILIENCE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

Failures of engineered systems can lead to significant economic and societal losses. Despite tremendous efforts (e.g., $200 billion annually) denoted to reliability and maintenance, unexpected catastrophic failures still occurs. To minimize the losses, reliability of engineered systems must be ensured throughout their life-cycle amidst uncertain operational condition and manufacturing variability. In most engineered systems, the required system reliability level under adverse events is achieved by adding system redundancies and/or conducting system reliability-based design optimization (RBDO). However, a high level of system redundancy increases a system's life-cycle cost (LCC) and system RBDO cannot ensure the system reliability when unexpected loading/environmental conditions are applied and unexpected system failures are developed. In contrast, a new design paradigm, referred to as resilience-driven system design, can ensure highly reliable system designs under any loading/environmental conditions and system failures while considerably reducing systems' LCC. In order to facilitate the development of formal methodologies for this design paradigm, this research aims at advancing two essential and co-related research areas: Research Thrust 1 - system RBDO and Research Thrust 2 - system prognostics and health management (PHM). In Research Thrust 1, reliability analyses under uncertainty will be carried out in both component and system levels against critical failure mechanisms. In Research Thrust 2, highly accurate and robust PHM systems will be designed for engineered systems with a single or multiple time-scale(s). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system RBDO and PHM techniques, multiple engineering case studies will be presented and discussed. Following the development of Research Thrusts 1 and 2, Research Thrust 3 - resilience-driven system design will establish a theoretical basis and design framework of engineering resilience in a mathematical and statistical context, where engineering resilience will be formulated in terms of system reliability and restoration and the proposed design framework will be demonstrated with a simplified aircraft control actuator design problem

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

A hybrid prognostics approach for motorized spindle-tool holder remaining useful life prediction

The quality and efficiency of high-speed machining are restricted by the matching performance of the motorized spindle-tool holder. In high speed cutting process, the mating surface is subjected to alternating torque, repeated clamping wear and centrifugal force, which results in serious degradation of mating performance. Therefore, for the purpose of the optimum maintenance time, periodic evaluation and prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) should be carried out. Firstly, the mapping model between the current of the motorized spindle and matching performance was extracted, and the degradation characteristics of spindle-tool holder were emphatically analyzed. After the original current is de-noised by an adaptive threshold function, the extent of degradation was identified by the amplitudes of wavelet packet entropy. A hybrid prognostics combining Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) i.e. AI-model with power regression i.e. statistical model was proposed to predict the RUL. Finally, the proposed scheme was verified based on a motorized spindle reliability test platform. The experimental results show that the current signal processing method based on wavelet packet and entropy can reflect the change of the degradation characteristics sensitively. Compared with other two similar models, the hybrid model proposed can accurately predict the RUL. This model is suitable for complex and high reliability equipment when Condition Monitoring (CM) data is scarcer

A new hybrid prognostic methodology

Methodologies for prognostics usually centre on physics-based or data-driven approaches. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but accurate prediction relies on extensive data being available. For industrial applications this is very rarely the case, and hence the chosen method’s performance can deteriorate quite markedly from optimal. For this reason a hybrid methodology, merging physics-based and data-driven approaches, has been developed and is reported here. Most, if not all, hybrid methods apply physics-based and data-driven approaches in different steps of the prognostics process (i.e. state estimation and state forecasting). The presented technique combines both methods in forecasting, and integrates the short-term prediction of a physics-based model with the longer term projection of a similarity-based data-driven model, to obtain remaining useful life estimation. The proposed hybrid prognostic methodology has been tested on two engineering datasets, one for crack growth and the other for filter clogging. The performance of the presented methodology has been evaluated by comparing remaining useful life estimations obtained from both hybrid and individual prognostic models. The results show that the presented methodology improves accuracy, robustness and applicability, especially in the case of minimal data being available

Data-driven prognostic method based on Bayesian approaches for direct remaining useful life prediction.

International audienceReliability of prognostics and health management systems (PHM) relies upon accurate understanding of critical components' degradation process to predict the remaining useful life (RUL). Traditionally, degradation process is represented in the form of data or expert models. Such models require extensive experimentation and verification that are not always feasible. Another approach that builds up knowledge about the system degradation over the time from component sensor data is known as data driven. Data driven models, however, require that sufficient historical data have been collected. In this paper, a two phases data driven method for RUL prediction is presented. In the offline phase, the proposed method builds on finding variables that contain information about the degradation behavior using unsupervised variable selection method. Different health indicators (HI) are constructed from the selected variables, which represent the degradation as a function of time, and saved in the offline database as reference models. In the online phase, the method finds the most similar offline health indicator, to the online health indicator, using k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classifier to use it as a RUL predictor. The method finally estimates the degradation state using discrete Bayesian filter. The method is verified using battery and turbofan engine degradation simulation data acquired from NASA data repository. The results show the effectiveness of the method in predicting the RUL for both applications

Fault Diagnosis and Failure Prognostics of Lithium-ion Battery based on Least Squares Support Vector Machine and Memory Particle Filter Framework

123456A novel data driven approach is developed for fault diagnosis and remaining useful life (RUL) prognostics for lithium-ion batteries using Least Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) and Memory-Particle Filter (M-PF). Unlike traditional data-driven models for capacity fault diagnosis and failure prognosis, which require multidimensional physical characteristics, the proposed algorithm uses only two variables: Energy Efficiency (EE), and Work Temperature. The aim of this novel framework is to improve the accuracy of incipient and abrupt faults diagnosis and failure prognosis. First, the LSSVM is used to generate residual signal based on capacity fade trends of the Li-ion batteries. Second, adaptive threshold model is developed based on several factors including input, output model error, disturbance, and drift parameter. The adaptive threshold is used to tackle the shortcoming of a fixed threshold. Third, the M-PF is proposed as the new method for failure prognostic to determine Remaining Useful Life (RUL). The M-PF is based on the assumption of the availability of real-time observation and historical data, where the historical failure data can be used instead of the physical failure model within the particle filter. The feasibility of the framework is validated using Li-ion battery prognostic data obtained from the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Prognostic Center of Excellence (PCoE). The experimental results show the following: (1) fewer data dimensions for the input data are required compared to traditional empirical models; (2) the proposed diagnostic approach provides an effective way of diagnosing Li-ion battery fault; (3) the proposed prognostic approach can predict the RUL of Li-ion batteries with small error, and has high prediction accuracy; and, (4) the proposed prognostic approach shows that historical failure data can be used instead of a physical failure model in the particle filter

Real-time aging trajectory prediction using a base model-oriented gradient-correction particle filter for Lithium-ion batteries

Predicting batteries' future degradation is essential for developing durable electric vehicles. The technical challenges arise from the absence of full battery degradation model and the inevitable local aging fluctuations in the uncontrolled environments. This paper proposes a base model-oriented gradient-correction particle filter (GC-PF) to predict aging trajectories of Lithium-ion batteries. Specifically, under the framework of typical particle filter, a gradient corrector is employed for each particle, resulting in the evolution of particle could follow the direction of gradient descent. This gradient corrector is also regulated by a base model. In this way, global information suggested by the base model is fully utilized, and the algorithm's sensitivity could be reduced accordingly. Further, according to the prediction deviations of base model, weighting factors between the local observations and base model can be updated adaptively. Four different battery datasets are used to extensively verify the proposed algorithm. Quantitatively, the RMSEs of GC-PF can be limited to 1.75%, which is 44% smaller than that of the conventional particle filter. In addition, the consistency of predictions when using different size of training data is also improved by 32%. Due to the pure data-driven nature, the proposed algorithm can also be extendable to other battery types