Challenges, Issues, and Lessons Learned Implementing Prognostics for Propulsion Systems

Author(s):  
Andrew Hess ◽  
Peter Frith ◽  
Eva Suarez

The desire and need for real predictive prognostics capabilities have been around for as long as man has operated complex and expensive machinery. There has been a long history of developing and implementing various degrees of prognostic and predictive useful life remaining capabilities. Stringent Diagnostic, Prognostic, and Health Management capability requirements are being placed on many of the new platform applications. While life usage accounting and fault detection / isolation effectiveness, with low false alarm rates, continue to improve on these new applications; prognostics requirements are even more ambitious and present very significant challenges to the system design teams. Though advanced life prediction and prognostic capabilities are being addressed for many mechanical and electronic systems; there are some unique challenges and issues associated with modern propulsion system applications. This paper will explore some of these design challenges and issues; discuss the various degrees of prognostic capabilities; address potential development methodologies; and draw heavily on lessons learned from previous prognostic development efforts.

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Bartosz Stanisław Przybyła ◽  
Radoslaw Przysowa ◽  
Zbigniew Zapałowicz

Purpose EC-135P2+ helicopters operated by Polish Medical Air Rescue are highly exposed to environmental particles entering engines when performing helicopter emergency medical services. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of inlet barrier filters installed to protect the engines, including their impact on maintenance. Design/methodology/approach The organisation adopted a comprehensive set of measures to predict and limit the impact of dust ingestion including visual inspections, health management and engine trend monitoring based on ground power checks’ (GPC) results. Three alternative particle separation solutions were considered. Finally, helicopter inlets were modified to allow the selected filter system to be installed, which reduced the number of particles ingested by the engine and prevented from premature overhauls. Findings The analyses carried out enabled not only the selection of the optimal filtration solution and its seamless implementation into the fleet but also confirmed its efficiency. After installing the filters, engines’ lifetime is extended from 500 to 4,500 flight hours while operating costs and the number of maintenance tasks was reduced significantly. Originality/value Lessons learned from operational experience show that a well-matched particle separation system can mitigate accelerated engine deterioration even if the platform is continuously exposed to environmental particles. The remaining useful life of engines can be predicted using performance models and data from GPC.


Author(s):  
Tim Hight ◽  
Chris Kitts

The proportion of Santa Clara University School of Engineering interdisciplinary senior design teams has been rising over the last five years. While many of those teams have been very successful, there has been a significant overhead price paid by the team members who chose to tackle these projects. Since the spring of 2004, an interdisciplinary team of faculty at SCU has been working to reduce the obstacles that have hindered interdisciplinary design teams in the past. Each department had independently developed its own processes and time schedule over the years, and the variations inherent in these separate programs had created some significant difficulties for the students trying to satisfy incongruent requirements. Recent advances have focused primarily on three departments: Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering. Curricular changes across departments include a number of innovations ranging from aligning schedules and deliverables to introducing joint team-building activities. A short history of the development of each department’s approach will be presented, followed by the current, more integral, plan and the issues that have arisen in its implementation. Many of the changes that have been made are closely tied to ABET-related continuous improvement efforts. A strong commitment to enhancing interdisciplinary design team experiences has been a core tenet of the involved departments. Lessons learned and successes will be discussed as well.


2020 ◽  
Vol 312 ◽  
pp. 02009
Author(s):  
Millicent Asah-Kissiedu ◽  
Patrick Manu ◽  
Colin Booth ◽  
Abdul-Majeed Mahamadu

Implementing separate Environmental Management System (EMS) and Safety and Health Management System (SHMS) can be costly for organisations and hence the advent of integrated management systems. The effective implementation of integrated safety, health and environmental (SHE) management would require companies to have the appropriate organisational capability. Within the academic literature, it is unclear which organisational attributes are important for ascertaining integrated SHE management capability of construction companies. This study sought to address this through a comprehensive review of literature relating to SHE management in construction and SHE management systems and models. The study revealed that organisational attributes that could determine integrated SHE management capability include: senior management commitment to SHE; SHE risks management; SHE objectives and programs; staff competencies; resources for SHE implementation; SHE roles and responsibilities; SHE communications; SHE documentation and control measures; SHE emergency plans; SHE monitoring and performance measurement; and SHE auditing and management review to capture lessons learned. These attributes could enable construction companies and other key industry stakeholders to understand construction companies’ capability to implement an integrated SHE management system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dangbo Du ◽  
Jianxun Zhang ◽  
Xiaosheng Si ◽  
Changhua Hu

Background: Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is the central mission to the complex systems’ prognostics and health management. During last decades, numbers of developments and applications of the RUL estimation have proliferated. Objective: As one of the most popular approaches, stochastic process-based approach has been widely used for characterizing the degradation trajectories and estimating RULs. This paper aimed at reviewing the latest methods and patents on this topic. Methods: The review is concentrated on four common stochastic processes for degradation modelling and RUL estimation, i.e., Gamma process, Wiener process, inverse Gaussian process and Markov chain. Results: After a briefly review of these four models, we pointed out the pros and cons of them, as well as the improvement direction of each method. Conclusion: For better implementation, the applications of these four approaches on maintenance and decision-making are systematically introduced. Finally, the possible future trends are concluded tentatively.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (4_suppl3) ◽  
pp. S281-S292 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Wirth ◽  
Arnaud Laillou ◽  
Fabian Rohner ◽  
Christine A. Northrop-Clewes ◽  
Barbara Macdonald ◽  
...  

Background Fortification of staple foods has been repeatedly recommended as an effective approach to reduce micronutrient deficiencies. With the increased number of fortification projects globally, there is a need to share practical lessons learned relating to their implementation and responses to project-related and external challenges. Objective To document the achievements, challenges, lessons learned, and management responses associated with national fortification projects in Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Methods Independent end-of-project evaluations conducted for each project served as the primary data source and contain the history of, and project activities undertaken for, each fortification project. Other sources, including national policy documents, project reports from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and other stakeholders, industry assessments, and peer-reviewed articles, were used to document the current responses to challenges and future project plans. Results All projects had key achievements related to the development of fortification standards and the procurement of equipment for participating industry partners. Mandatory fortification of wheat flour was a key success in Morocco and Uzbekistan. Ensuring the quality of fortified foods was a common challenge experienced across the projects, as were shifts in consumption patterns and market structures. Adjustments were made to the projects' design to address the challenges faced. Conclusions National fortification projects are dynamic and must be continually modified in response to specific performance issues and broader shifts in market structure and consumption patterns.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 74S-89S ◽  
Author(s):  
Michio Murakami ◽  
Akiko Sato ◽  
Shiro Matsui ◽  
Aya Goto ◽  
Atsushi Kumagai ◽  
...  

The Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011 posed major threats to public health. In response, medical professionals have tried to communicate the risks to residents. To investigate forms of risk communication and to share lessons learned, we reviewed medical professionals’ activities in Fukushima Prefecture from the prefectural level to the individual level: public communication through Fukushima Health Management Surveys, a Yorozu (“general”) health consultation project, communications of radiological conditions and health promotion in Iitate and Kawauchi villages, dialogues based on whole-body counter, and science communications through online media. The activities generally started with radiation risks, mainly through group-based discussions, but gradually shifted to face-to-face communications to address comprehensive health risks to individuals and well-being. The activities were intended to support residents’ decisions and to promote public health in a participatory manner. This article highlights the need for a systematic evaluation of ongoing risk communication practices, and a wider application of successful approaches for Fukushima recovery and for better preparedness for future disasters.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Rubyet Islam ◽  
Peter Sandborn

Abstract Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the point at which systems or components will no longer perform as intended. The prediction is often articulated as a Remaining Useful Life (RUL). RUL is an important decision-making tool for contingency mitigation, i.e., the prediction of an RUL (and its associated confidence) enables decisions to be made about how and when to maintain the system. PHM is generally applied to hardware systems in the electronics and non-electronics application domains. The application of PHM (and RUL) concepts has not been explored for application to software. Today, software (SW) health management is confined to diagnostic assessments that identify problems, whereas prognostic assessment potentially indicates when in the future a problem will become detrimental to the operation of the system. Relevant areas such as SW defect prediction, SW reliability prediction, predictive maintenance of SW, SW degradation, and SW performance prediction, exist, but all represent static models, built upon historical data — none of which can calculate an RUL. This paper addresses the application of PHM concepts to software systems for fault predictions and RUL estimation. Specifically, we wish to address how PHM can be used to make decisions for SW systems such as version update, module changes, rejuvenation, maintenance scheduling and abandonment. This paper presents a method to prognostically and continuously predict the RUL of a SW system based on usage parameters (e.g., numbers and categories of releases) and multiple performance parameters (e.g., response time). The model is validated based on actual data (on performance parameters), generated by the test beds versus predicted data, generated by a predictive model. Statistical validation (regression validation) has been carried out as well. The test beds replicate and validate faults, collected from a real application, in a controlled and standard test (staging) environment. A case study based on publicly available data on faults and enhancement requests for the open-source Bugzilla application is presented. This case study demonstrates that PHM concepts can be applied to SW systems and RUL can be calculated to make decisions on software version update or upgrade, module changes, rejuvenation, maintenance schedule and total abandonment.


Author(s):  
Pradeep Lall ◽  
Hao Zhang ◽  
Lynn Davis

The reliability consideration of LED products includes both luminous flux drop and color shift. Previous research either talks about luminous maintenance or color shift, because luminous flux degradation usually takes very long time to observe. In this paper, the impact of a VOC (volatile organic compound) contaminated luminous flux and color stability are examined. As a result, both luminous degradation and color shift had been recorded in a short time. Test samples are white, phosphor-converted, high-power LED packages. Absolute radiant flux is measured with integrating sphere system to calculate the luminous flux. Luminous flux degradation and color shift distance were plotted versus aging time to show the degradation pattern. A prognostic health management (PHM) method based on the state variables and state estimator have been proposed in this paper. In this PHM framework, unscented kalman filter (UKF) was deployed as the carrier of all states. During the estimation process, third order dynamic transfer function was used to implement the PHM framework. Both of the luminous flux and color shift distance have been used as the state variable with the same PHM framework to exam the robustness of the method. Predicted remaining useful life is calculated at every measurement point to compare with the tested remaining useful life. The result shows that state estimator can be used as the method for the PHM of LED degradation with respect to both luminous flux and color shift distance. The prediction of remaining useful life of LED package, made by the states estimator and data driven approach, falls in the acceptable error-bounds (20%) after a short training of the estimator.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 1511-1523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antreas Kantaros ◽  
Olaf Diegel

Purpose This paper aims to discuss additive manufacturing (AM) in the context of applications for musical instruments. It examines the main AM technologies used in musical instruments, goes through a history of musical applications of AM and raises the questions about the application of AM to create completely new wind instruments that would be impossible to produce with conventional manufacturing. Design/methodology/approach A literature research is presented which covers a historical application of AM to musical instruments and hypothesizes on some potential new applications. Findings AM has found extensive application to create conventional musical instruments with unique aesthetics designs. It’s true potential to create entirely new sounds, however, remains largely untapped. Research limitations/implications More research is needed to truly assess the potential of additive manufacturing to create entirely new sounds for musical instrument. Practical implications The application of AM in music could herald an entirely new class of musical instruments with unique sounds. Originality/value This study highlights musical instruments as an unusual application of AM. It highlights the potential of AM to create entirely new sounds, which could create a whole new class of musical instruments.


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