Abstract
Electrical systems, such as those consisting of electrical power driving motors and actuators, are varied and include industrial, aerospace, and automotive applications. These power systems are critical and must provide stable operating voltages for various modules found throughout the host system, including electromechanical actuators (Goodman et al., 2007), CPU-based control systems, and widely varying loads. Operating temperatures can vary as well, with vibration and mechanical shock conditions adding further stress and degradation of components in the power system. A key advantage of electronic prognostics is the monitoring of health of a power system in these critical systems. With prognostics, impending failure can be detected and mitigated. In addition, the prognostics and health management (PHM) system can help optimize the support logistics and reduce costs.
In this paper, an overview of signature-based PHM technology to detect anomalies and prognostic reasoning is presented: A signature is extracted from condition-based data and is called a fault-to-failure progression (FFP) signature. Thereafter, a representative PHM system that extracts and processes dynamic degradation signatures for a critical DC regulated power system is described. The hardware and software integration involved with the addition of advanced PHM functionality to a host system is discussed, along with resulting output display and data that can be used to provide dynamic state-of-health (SoH) and remaining useful life (RUL) estimates.
