Prognostics and health management (PHM) is very important to guarantee the reliability and safety of aerospace systems, and sensing and test are the precondition of PHM. Integrating design for testability into early design stage of system early design stage is deemed as a fundamental way to improve PHM performance, and testability model is the base of testability analysis and design. This paper discusses a hierarchical model-based approach to testability modeling and analysis for heading attitude system health management. Quantified directed graph, of which the nodes represent components and tests and the directed edges represent fault propagation paths, is used to describe fault-test dependency, and quantitative testability information is assigned to nodes and directed edges. The fault dependencies between nodes can be obtained by functional fault analysis methodology that captures the physical architecture and material flows such as energy, heat, data, and so on. By incorporating physics of failure models into component, the dynamic process of a failing or degrading component can be projected onto system behavior, i.e., system symptoms. Then, the analysis of extended failure modes, mechanisms and effects is utilized to construct fault evolution-test dependency. Using this integrated model, the designers and system analysts can assess the test suite's fault detectability, fault isolability and fault predictability. And heading attitude system application results show that the proposed model can support testability analysis and design for PHM very well.
Associating environmental stresses (ESs) with built-in test (BIT) output is an important means to help diagnose intermittent faults (IFs). Aiming at low efficiency in association of traditional time stress measurement device (TSMD), an association model is built. Thereafter, a novel approach is given to evaluate the integrated environmental stress (IES) level. Firstly, the selection principle and approach of main environmental stresses (MESs) and key characteristic parameters (KCPs) are presented based on fault mode, mechanism, and ESs analysis (FMMEA). Secondly, reference stress events (RSEs) are constructed by dividing IES into three stress levels according to its impact on faults; and then the association model between integrated environmental stress event (IESE) and BIT output is built. Thirdly, an interval grey association approach to evaluate IES level is proposed due to the interval number of IES value. Consequently, the association output can be obtained as well. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach. Results show the proposed model and approach are effective and feasible. This approach can be used to guide ESs measure, record, and association. It is well suited for on-line assistant diagnosis of faults, especially IFs.
Sensor selection and optimization is one of the important parts in design for testability. To address the problems that the traditional sensor optimization selection model does not take the requirements of prognostics and health management especially fault prognostics for testability into account and does not consider the impacts of sensor actual attributes on fault detectability, a novel sensor optimization selection model is proposed. Firstly, a universal architecture for sensor selection and optimization is provided. Secondly, a new testability index named fault predictable rate is defined to describe fault prognostics requirements for testability. Thirdly, a sensor selection and optimization model for prognostics and health management is constructed, which takes sensor cost as objective function and the defined testability indexes as constraint conditions. Due to NP-hard property of the model, a generic algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal solution. At last, a case study is presented to demonstrate the sensor selection approach for a stable tracking servo platform. The application results and comparison analysis show the proposed model and algorithm are effective and feasible. This approach can be used to select sensors for prognostics and health management of any system.
In the helicopter transmission systems, it is important to monitor and track the tooth damage evolution using lots of sensors and detection methods. This paper develops a novel approach for sensor selection based on physical model and sensitivity analysis. Firstly, a physical model of tooth damage and mesh stiffness is built. Secondly, some effective condition indicators(CIs) are presented, and the optimal CIs set is selected by comparing their test statistics according to Mann–Kendall test. Afterwards, the selected CIs are used to generate a health indicator(HI)through sen slop estimator. Then, the sensors are selected according to the monotonic relevance and sensitivity to the damage levels. Finally, the proposed method is verified by the simulation and experimental data. The results show that the approach can provide a guide for health monitoring of helicopter transmission systems, and it is effective to reduce the test cost and improve the system's reliability.
