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Original Date: 11/01/2004
Revision Date: 01/18/2007
Information : Integrated Prognostics and Health Monitoring for Electronic Products and Systems
Health monitoring is emerging as a promising methodology for assessing and maintaining the reliability of a product. The Center for Advanced Life-Cycle Engineering has developed prognostic and health monitoring methodologies for next-generation electronic equipment. These methodologies can be used to provide advance warning of failure, prevent catastrophic failure, assess reliability, reduce unscheduled maintenance, identify faults efficiently, and improve qualification methods for both the design and manufacture of future electronic products.
The Center for Advanced Life-Cycle Engineering’s (CALCE’s) motivation for developing Integrated Prognostics and Health Monitoring for Electronic Products and Systems was the lack of software to assess the life-cycle reliability of an electronic product. Although health monitoring methodologies have been routinely employed in mechanical systems, civil structures, and aircrafts, their application to electronics is extremely challenging due to the small scale of electronic structures and inadequate correlation between degradation and loss of performance or failure.
Health monitoring is a method of assessing the degradation of a product (reliability) in its life-cycle environment by continuous or periodic monitoring and interpretation of the parameters indicative of its health. Product health monitoring can be implemented through the use of various techniques to sense and interpret the parameters indicative of performance degradation (deviation of operating parameters from qualified normal operating behavior), physical or electrical degradation (material cracking, corrosion, delamination, increase in electrical resistance or threshold voltage), and changes in a life-cycle environment (usage duration and frequency, ambient temperature and humidity, vibration, and shock). CALCE strategies include the use of:
Sensor technologies with physics-of-failure (PoF) analysis to assess real-time life consumption;
Software modules to support environment and usage data collection that enables health management.
Diagnostic software-firmware systems to identify and locate faults;
In situ prognostic monitors to predict remaining life; and
Software to enable maintenance planning and business case development for systems containing PHM structures
CALCE methodologies have been successfully demonstrated for an electronic board operated in an automotive underhood environment. CALCE has already conducted a remaining life assessment of the space shuttle remote manipulator system electronics for NASA and is currently conducting health and life assessment for NASA’s space shuttle rocket booster electronics hardware. Ongoing research focuses on the development of an integrated hardware-software that can enable real-time health and usage monitoring of electronic products in the application environment. Existing software takes environmental and operational sensor data as input, and processes it using data reduction and cycle counting algorithms to predict the remaining life of the product using appropriate stress-damage models.
CALCE’s vision for the future of PHM is to develop software modules and hardware that will enable health monitoring and prognostics of electronics. The hardware will incorporate local sensors, microprocessor, memory, power supply, and networking capabilities. Embedded software will take a hybrid data- and model-driven approach to perform prognostics, building upon current data-reduction and exploration techniques to predict the remaining life of electronic systems. Adoption of this technology in air, land, and naval applications would enable real-time life decisions to reconfigure the operational force structure, order spare parts, and schedule maintenance to maximize the combat utility.
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