A Data-Driven Health Assessment Method for Electromechanical Actuation Systems

The design of health assessment applications for the electromechanical actuation system of the aircraft is a challenging task. Physics-of-failure models involve non-linear complex equations which are further complicated at the system-level. Data-driven techniques require run-to-failure tests to predict the remaining useful life. However, components are not allowed to run until failure in the aerospace engineering arena. Besides, when adding new monitoring elements for an improved health assessment, the airliner sets constraints due to the increased cost and weight. In this context, the health assessment of the electromechanical actuation system is a challenging task. In this paper we propose a data-driven approach which estimates the health state of the system without runto-failure data and limited health information. The approach combines basic reliability theory with Bayesian concepts and obtained results show the feasibility of the technique for asset health assessment

Building an Air Turbine Conditional Anomaly Detection Approach for Wave Power Plants

The Mutriku Wave Power Plant (WPP) is a wave energy conversion plant based on the oscillating water column technology (OWC). The energy production and the health state of the plant are directly dependent on the sea-state conditions along with component-specific operation efficiency and failure modes. In this context, this paper presents a preliminary air turbine conditional anomaly detection (CAD) approach for condition monitoring of the Mutriku WPP. The proposed approach is developed based on an ensemble of Gaussian Mixture models, where each anomaly detection model learns the expected air turbine operation conditioned on specific seastates information. Early results show that the integration of sea-states in the anomaly detection learning process improves the discrimination capability of the anomaly detection model

Selecting appropriate machine learning classifiers for DGA diagnosis

Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is a common method of assessing transformer health. There are a number of machine learning classifiers reported to give a high accuracy on specific datasets, such as Artificial Neural Networks or Support Vector Machines. When these methods reach the same conclusion about the type of fault present, this can give an increased confidence in the veracity of the diagnosis. However, it is critical to analyze and quantify the strength of these classifiers in the presence of conflicting data to test their practicality for usage in the field. This paper investigates the adequacy of different machine learning based DGA diagnosis models in the presence of conflicting data. The proposed method will aid engineers with the selection of machine learning models so as to maximize the usability and accuracy in the presence of conflicting data