Adaptive Degradation Prognostic Reasoning by Particle Filter with a Neural Network Degradation Model for Turbofan Jet Engine

Abstract

In the aerospace industry, every minute of downtime because of equipment failure impacts operations significantly. Therefore, efficient maintenance, repair and overhaul processes to aid maximum equipment availability are essential. However, scheduled maintenance is costly and does not track the degradation of the equipment which could result in unexpected failure of the equipment. Prognostic Health Management (PHM) provides techniques to monitor the precise degradation of the equipment along with cost-effective reliability. This article presents an adaptive data-driven prognostics reasoning approach. An engineering case study of Turbofan Jet Engine has been used to demonstrate the prognostic reasoning approach. The emphasis of this article is on an adaptive data-driven degradation model and how to improve the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction performance in condition monitoring of a Turbofan Jet Engine. The RUL prediction results show low prediction errors regardless of operating conditions, which contrasts with a conventional data-driven model (a non-parameterised Neural Network model) where prediction errors increase as operating conditions deviate from the nominal condition. In this article, the Neural Network has been used to build the Nominal model and Particle Filter has been used to track the present degradation along with degradation parameter.