Power Drive Electronics
Power electronic converters, drives, and modern electric machines continue to play a critical role in the performance and overall operation of military ships, aircraft and ground vehicles. Impact is developing diagnostics/prognostics and health management technologies to detect faults in their incipient stages in order to avoid further damage and eventual failures leading to significant downtime for electric machinery and power drives. The goal is to create a system that has both an acute awareness if its own health state and the capability to do something about it, while seamlessly embedded in the power drives and electric machinery. This increase in reliability provides a necessary improvement to our ships allowing for reduced manning and maintenance/support at sea, reduced overall life cycle costs, and improved readiness for the war fighter.
The proposed systems approach maximizes the use of the available measured parameters and design knowledge. Advanced signal processing techniques are used to determine incipient fault detections, while extracted features and models are used for failure progression tracking.Selected features and model estimates that track well with the health of particular components are fused to determine LRU health indices. Complementary prognostic techniques including analysis of projected operating conditions by physics-based component damage accumulation/aging models are then used to determine the remaining useful life.Based on the health predictions, self healing or fault accommodating methods are used to automatically provide a “limp home” or reduced capability solution (change in control/operations) to avoid critical system failures or shutdowns while at sea.
