scholarly journals Unsupervised Fault Detection and Prediction of Remaining Useful Life for Online Prognostic Health Management of Mechanical Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4120
Author(s):  
Francesca Calabrese ◽  
Alberto Regattieri ◽  
Lucia Botti ◽  
Cristina Mora ◽  
Francesco Gabriele Galizia

Predictive maintenance allows industries to keep their production systems available as much as possible. Reducing unforeseen shutdowns to a level that is close to zero has numerous advantages, including production cost savings, a high quality level of both products and processes, and a high safety level. Studies in this field have focused on a novel approach, prognostic health management (PHM), which relies on condition monitoring (CM) for predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of a system. However, several issues remain in its application to real industrial contexts, e.g., the difficulties in conducting tests simulating each fault condition, the dynamic nature of industrial environments, and the need to handle large amounts of data collected from machinery. In this paper, a data-driven methodology for PHM implementation is proposed, which has the following characteristics: it is unsupervised, i.e., it does not require any prior knowledge regarding fault behaviors and it does not rely on pre-trained classification models, i.e., it can be applied “from scratch”; it can be applied online due to its low computational effort, which makes it suitable for edge computing; and, it includes all of the steps that are involved in a prognostic program, i.e., feature extraction, health indicator (HI) construction, health stage (HS) division, degradation modelling, and RUL prediction. Finally, the proposed methodology is applied in this study to a rotating component. The study results, in terms of the ability of the proposed approach to make a timely prediction of component fault conditions, are promising.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferhat Tamssaouet ◽  
Thi Phuong Khanh Nguyen ◽  
Kamal Medjaher

Nowadays, the modern industry is increasingly demanding the availability and reliability of production systems as well as the reduction of maintenance costs. The techniques to achieving these goals are recognized and discussed under the term of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). However, the prognostics is often approached from a component point of view. The system-level prognostics (SLP), taking into account interdependencies and multi-interactions between system components, is still an underexplored area. Inspired from the inoperability input-output model (IIM), a new approach for SLP is proposed in this paper. The inoperability corresponds to the component’s degradation, i.e. the reduction of its performance in comparison to an ideal reference state. The interactions between component degradation and the effect of the environment are included when estimating the inoperability of components and also when predicting the system remaining useful life (SRUL). This approach can be applied to complex systems involving multi-heterogeneous components with a reasonable computational effort. Thus, it allows overcoming the lack of scope and scalability of the traditional approaches used in PHM. An illustrative example is presented and discussed in the paper to highlight the performance of the proposed approach.


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.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisong Qin ◽  
Qinghua Zhang ◽  
Qin Hu ◽  
Guoxi Sun ◽  
Jun He ◽  
...  

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction can provide early warnings of failure and has become a key component in the prognostics and health management of systems. Among the existing methods for RUL prediction, the Wiener-process-based method has attracted great attention owing to its favorable properties and flexibility in degradation modeling. However, shortcomings exist in methods of this type; for example, the degradation indicator and the first predicting time (FPT) are selected subjectively, which reduces the prediction accuracy. Toward this end, this paper proposes a new approach for predicting the RUL of rotating machinery based on an optimal degradation indictor. First, a genetic programming algorithm is proposed to construct an optimal degradation indicator using the concept of FPT. Then, a Wiener model based on the obtained optimal degradation indicator is proposed, in which the sensitivities of the dimensionless parameters are utilized to determine the FPT. Finally, the expectation of the predicted RUL is calculated based on the proposed model, and the estimated mean degradation path is explicitly derived. To demonstrate the validity of this model, several experiments on RUL prediction are conducted on rotating machinery. The experimental results indicate that the method can effectively improve the accuracy of RUL prediction.


Author(s):  
Behnam Razavi ◽  
Farrokh Sassani

The tasks of maintenance and repair without optimal planning can be costly and result in prolonged maintenance times, reduced availability and possible flight delays. Aircraft manufacturers and maintainers see significant benefits in constantly improving Health Management and Maintenance (HMM) practices by deploying the most effective maintenance planning strategies. The planning of the maintenance and repair is a complex task due to chain dependency of engines to aircraft, and aircraft to the flight schedules. This paper presents a scheduling method for determining the time of maintenance based on the historical engine operation data in order to maximize the use of estimated remaining useful life of the engines as well as lowering the cost and duration of the downtime. The Time-on-Wing (TOW) data is used in conjunction with probability density functions to determine the shape of the respective distribution of the time of maintenance to minimize the loss of expected remaining useful life. Data from each engine with most chance of failure is then selected and fed into an extended Branch and Bound (B&B) routine to determine the best optimum sequence for entering the facility in order to minimize the waiting time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Hai-Kun Wang ◽  
Yi Cheng ◽  
Ke Song

The remaining useful life estimation is a key technology in prognostics and health management (PHM) systems for a new generation of aircraft engines. With the increase in massive monitoring data, it brings new opportunities to improve the prediction from the perspective of deep learning. Therefore, we propose a novel joint deep learning architecture that is composed of two main parts: the transformer encoder, which uses scaled dot-product attention to extract dependencies across distances in time series, and the temporal convolution neural network (TCNN), which is constructed to fix the insensitivity of the self-attention mechanism to local features. Both parts are jointly trained within a regression module, which implies that the proposed approach differs from traditional ensemble learning models. It is applied on the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) dataset from the Prognostics Center of Excellence at NASA Ames, and satisfactory results are obtained, especially under complex working conditions.


Author(s):  
Giulio Gola ◽  
Bent H. Nystad

Oil and gas industries are constantly aiming at improving the efficiency of their operations. In this respect, focus is on the development of technology, methods, and work processes related to equipment condition and performance monitoring in order to achieve the highest standards in terms of safety and productivity. To this aim, a key issue is represented by maintenance optimization of critical structures, systems, and components. A way towards this goal is offered by Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) strategies. CBM aims at regulating maintenance scheduling based on data analyses and system condition monitoring and bears the potential advantage of obtaining relevant cost savings and improved operational safety and availability. A critical aspect of CBM is its integration with condition monitoring technologies for handling a wide range of information sources and eventually making optimal decisions on when and what to repair. In this chapter, a CBM case study concerning choke valves utilized in Norwegian offshore oil and gas platforms is proposed and investigated. The objective is to define a procedure for optimizing maintenance of choke valves by on-line monitoring their condition and determining their Remaining Useful Life (RUL). Choke valves undergo erosion caused by sand grains transported by the oil-water-gas mixture extracted from the well. Erosion is a critical problem which can affect the correct valve functioning, resulting in revenue losses and cause environmental hazards.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Guisheng Hou ◽  
Shuo Xu ◽  
Nan Zhou ◽  
Lei Yang ◽  
Quanhao Fu

Accurate predictions of remaining useful life (RUL) of important components play a crucial role in system reliability, which is the basis of prognostics and health management (PHM). This paper proposed an integrated deep learning approach for RUL prediction of a turbofan engine by integrating an autoencoder (AE) with a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN). In the pretraining stage, the reconstructed data of the AE not only participate in its error reconstruction but also take part in the DCGAN parameter training as the generated data of the DCGAN. Through double-error reconstructions, the capability of feature extraction is enhanced, and high-level abstract information is obtained. In the fine-tuning stage, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network is used to extract the sequential information from the features to predict the RUL. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified on the NASA commercial modular aero-propulsion system simulation (C-MAPSS) dataset. The superiority of the proposed method is demonstrated via excellent prediction performance and comparisons with other existing state-of-the-art prognostics. The results of this study suggest that the proposed data-driven prognostic method offers a new and promising prediction approach and an efficient feature extraction scheme.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 168781402091147
Author(s):  
Liansheng Liu ◽  
Qing Guo ◽  
Lulu Wang ◽  
Datong Liu

The in-situ prognostics and health management of aircraft auxiliary power unit faces difficulty using the sparse on-wing sensing data. As the key technology of prognostics and health management, remaining useful life prediction of in-situ aircraft auxiliary power unit is hard to achieve accurate results. To solve this problem, we propose one kind of quantitative analysis of its on-wing sensing data to implement remaining useful life prediction of auxiliary power unit. Except the most important performance parameter exhaust gas temperature, the other potential parameters are utilized based on mutual information, which can be used as the quantitative metric. In this way, the quantitative threshold of mutual information for enhancing remaining useful life prediction result can be determined. The implemented cross-validation experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The real on-wing sensing data of auxiliary power unit for experiment are from China Southern Airlines Company Limited Shenyang Maintenance Base, which spends over $6.5 million on auxiliary power unit maintenance and repair each year for the fleet of over 500 aircrafts. Although the relative improvement is not too large, it is helpful to reduce the maintenance and repair cost.


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