Principle of Duality on Prognostics

The accurate estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) of various components and devices used in complex systems, e.g., airplanes remain to be addressed by scientists and engineers. Currently, there area wide range of innovative proposals put forward that intend on solving this problem. Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) has thus far seen some growth in this sector, as a result of the extensive progress shown in demonstrating feasible and viable techniques. The problems related to these techniques were that they often consumed time and were too expensive and resourceful to develop. In this paper we present a radically novel approach for building prognostic models that compensates and improves on the current prognostic models inconsistencies and problems. Broadly speaking, the new approach proposes a state of the art technique that utilizes the physics of a system rather than the physics of a component to develop its prognostic model. A positive aspect of this approach is that the prognostic model can be generalized such that a new system could be developed on the basis and principles of the prognostic model of another system. This paper will mainly explore single switch dc-to-dc converters which will be used as an experiment to exemplify the potential success that can be discovered from the development of a novel prognostic model that can efficiently estimate the remaining useful life of one system based on the prognostics of its dual system

Developing Prognostic Models Using Duality Principles for DC-to-DC Converters

Within the field of Integrated System Health Management, there is still a lack of technological approaches suitable for the creation of adequate prognostic model for large applications whereby a number of similar or even identical subsystems and components are used. Existing similarity among a number of different systems, which are comprised of similar components but with different topologies, can be employed to assign the prognostics of one system to other systems using an inference engine. In the process of developing prognostics, this approach will thereby save resources and time. This paper presents a radically novel approach for building prognostic models based on system similarity in cases where duality principle in electrical systems is utilized. In this regard, unified damage model is created based on standard Tee/Pi models, prognostics model based on transfer functions, and remaining useful life (RUL) estimator based on how energy relaxation time of system is changed due to degradation. An advantage is that the prognostic model can be generalized such that a new system could be developed on the basis and principles of the prognostic model of other systems. Simple electronic circuits, dc-to-dc converters, are to be used as an experiment to exemplify the potential success of the proposed technique validated with prognostics models from particle filter