Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Turbofan Engine Using SAE-TCN Model

Abstract

Turbofan engines are known as the heart of the aircraft. The turbofan’s health state determines the aircraft’s operational status. Therefore, the equipment monitoring and maintenance of the engine is an important part of ensuring the healthy and stable operation of the aircraft, and it is vital to monitor the remaining useful life (RUL) of the engine. The monitored data of turbofan engines have high dimensions and a long time span, which cause difficulties in predicting the remaining useful life of the engine. This paper proposes a residual life prediction model based on Autoencoder and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Among them, Autoencoder is used to reduce the dimension of the data and extract features from the engine monitoring data. The TCN network is trained on the obtained low-dimensional data to predict the remaining useful life. The model mentioned in this article is verified on the NASA public data set (C-MAPSS) and compared with common machine learning methods and other deep neural networks. The SAE-TCN model achieved better scores on the FD001 independent testing data set with an RMSE of 18.01 and a score of 161. The average relative error of the model relative to other common learning models is 0.9499 in RMSE and 0.2656 in Scoring Function. The experimental results show that the model proposed in this paper performs the best in the evaluation, and this conclusion has important implications for engine health.