Predicting Remaining Useful Life with Similarity-Based Priors

Prognostics is the area of research that is concerned with predicting the remaining useful life of machines and machine parts. The remaining useful life is the time during which a machine or part can be used, before it must be replaced or repaired. To create accurate predictions, predictive techniques must take external data into account on the operating conditions of the part and events that occurred during its lifetime. However, such data is often not available. Similarity-based techniques can help in such cases. They are based on the hypothesis that if a curve developed similarly to other curves up to a point, it will probably continue to do so. This paper presents a novel technique for similarity-based remaining useful life prediction. In particular, it combines Bayesian updating with priors that are based on similarity estimation. The paper shows that this technique outperforms other techniques on long-term predictions by a large margin, although other techniques still perform better on short-term predictions.</p

Residual Life Distributions from Component Degradation Signals: A Bayesian Approach

Received and accepted Real-time condition monitoring is becoming an important tool in maintenance decision-making. Condition monitoring is the process of collecting real-time sensor information from a functioning device in order to reason about the health of the device. To make effective use of condition information, it is useful to characterize a device degradation signal, a quantity computed from condition information that captures the current state of the device and provides information on how that condition is likely to evolve in the future. If properly modeled, the degradation signal can be used to compute a residual-life distribution for the device being monitored, which can the

Dynamic Data-Driven Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Systems

Abstract. In this multi-university collaborative research, we will develop a framework for the dynamic data-driven fault diagnosis of wind turbines which aims at making the wind energy a competitive alternative in the energy market. This new methodology is fundamentally different from the current practice whose performance is limited due to the non-dynamic and non-robust nature in the modeling approaches and in the data collection and processing strategies. The new methodology consists of robust data pre-processing modules, interrelated, multi-level models that describe different details of the system behaviors, and a dynamic strategy that allows for measurements to be adaptively taken according to specific physical conditions and the associated risk level. This paper summarizes the latest progresses in the research.