scholarly journals Failure Prognosis Based on Relevant Measurements Identification and Data-Driven Trend-Modeling: Application to a Fuel Cell System

Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Mohand Djeziri ◽  
Oussama Djedidi ◽  
Samir Benmoussa ◽  
Marc Bendahan ◽  
Jean-Luc Seguin

Fuel cells are key elements in the transition to clean energy thanks to their neutral carbon footprint, as well as their great capacity for the generation of electrical energy by oxidizing hydrogen. However, these cells operate under straining conditions of temperature and humidity that favor degradation processes. Furthermore, the presence of hydrogen—a highly flammable gas—renders the assessment of their degradations and failures crucial to the safety of their use. This paper deals with the combination of physical knowledge and data analysis for the identification of health indices (HIs) that carry information on the degradation process of fuel cells. Then, a failure prognosis method is achieved through the trend modeling of the identified HI using a data-driven and updatable state model. Finally, the remaining useful life is predicted through the calculation of the times of crossing of the predicted HI and the failure threshold. The trend model is updated when the estimation error between the predicted and measured values of the HI surpasses a predefined threshold to guarantee the adaptation of the prediction to changes in the operating conditions of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by evaluating the obtained experimental results with prognosis performance analysis techniques.

Author(s):  
Peng Ding ◽  
Hua Wang ◽  
Yongfen Dai

Diagnosing the failure or predicting the performance state of low-speed and heavy-load slewing bearings is a practical and effective method to reduce unexpected stoppage or optimize the maintenances. Many literatures focus on the performance prediction of small rolling bearings, while studies on slewing bearings' health evaluation are very rare. Among these rare studies, supervised or unsupervised data-driven models are often used alone, few researchers devote to remaining useful life (RUL) prediction using the joint application of two learning modes which could fully take diversity and complexity of slewing bearings' degradation and damage into consideration. Therefore, this paper proposes a clustering-based framework with aids of supervised models and multiple physical signals. Correlation analysis and principle component analysis (PCA)-based multiple sensitive features in time-domain are used to establish the performance recession indicators (PRIs) of torque, temperature, and vibration. Subsequently, these three indicators are divided into several parts representing different degradation periods via optimized self-organizing map (OSOM). Finally, corresponding data-driven life models of these degradation periods are generated. Experimental results indicate that multiple physical signals can effectively describe the degradation process. The proposed clustering-based framework is provided with a more accurate prediction of slewing bearings' RUL and well reflects the performance recession periods.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 498
Author(s):  
Andrzej Wilk ◽  
Daniel Węcel

Currently, fuel cells are increasingly used in industrial installations, means of transport, and household applications as a source of electricity and heat. The paper presents the results of experimental tests of a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) at variable load, which characterizes the cell’s operation in real installations. A detailed analysis of the power needed for operation fuel cell auxiliary devices (own needs power) was carried out. An analysis of net and gross efficiency was carried out in various operating conditions of the device. The measurements made show changes in the performance of the fuel cell during step changing or smooth changing of an electric load. Load was carried out as a change in the current or a change in the resistance of the receiver. The analysis covered the times of reaching steady states and the efficiency of the fuel cell system taking into account auxiliary devices. In the final part of the article, an analysis was made of the influence of the fuel cell duration of use on obtained parameters. The analysis of the measurement results will allow determination of the possibility of using fuel cells in installations with a rapidly changing load profile and indicate possible solutions to improve the performance of the installation.


Author(s):  
Mohammadreza Kaji ◽  
Jamshid Parvizian ◽  
Hans Wernher van de Venn

Estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of components is a crucial task to enhance the reliability, safety, productivity, and to reduce maintenance cost. In general, predicting the RUL of a component includes constructing a health indicator (HI) to infer the current condition of the component, and modelling the degradation process, to estimate the future behavior. Although many signal processing and data-driven based methods were proposed to construct the HI, most of the existing methods are based on manual feature extraction techniques, and need the prior knowledge of experts, or rely on a large amount of failure data. Therefore, in this study, a new data-driven method based on the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) is presented to construct the HI. For this purpose, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) technique is used to convert the raw acquired vibrational signals into a two-dimensional image; then, the CAE model, which learns the healthy operation data distribution, is used to construct the HI. The proposed method is tested on a benchmark bearing dataset and compared with several other traditional HI construction models. Experimental results indicate that the constructed HI exhibits a monotonically increasing degradation trend and has a good performance to detect incipient faults.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lixiao Cao ◽  
Zheng Qian ◽  
Hamid Zareipour ◽  
David Wood ◽  
Ehsan Mollasalehi ◽  
...  

Wind-powered electricity generation has grown significantly over the past decade. While there are many components that might impact their useful life, the gearbox and generator bearings are among the most fragile components in wind turbines. Therefore, the prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) of faulty or damaged wind turbine bearings will provide useful support for reliability evaluation and advanced maintenance of wind turbines. This paper proposes a data-driven method combining the interval whitenization method with a Gaussian process (GP) algorithm in order to predict the RUL of wind turbine generator bearings. Firstly, a wavelet packet transform is used to eliminate noise in the vibration signals and extract the characteristic fault signals. A comprehensive analysis of the real degradation process is used to determine the indicators of degradation. The interval whitenization method is proposed to reduce the interference of non-stationary operating conditions to improve the quality of health indicators. Finally, the GP method is utilized to construct the model which reflects the relationship between the RUL and health indicators. The method is assessed using actual vibration datasets from two wind turbines. The prediction results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the effect of non-stationary operating conditions. In addition, compared with the support vector regression (SVR) method and artificial neural network (ANN), the prediction accuracy of the proposed method has an improvement of more than 65.8%. The prediction results verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.


Data ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Khan ◽  
Omer Eker ◽  
Atif Khan ◽  
Wasim Orfali

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (24) ◽  
pp. 8948
Author(s):  
Mohammadreza Kaji ◽  
Jamshid Parvizian ◽  
Hans Wernher van de Venn

Estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of components is a crucial task to enhance reliability, safety, productivity, and to reduce maintenance cost. In general, predicting the RUL of a component includes constructing a health indicator (HI) to infer the current condition of the component, and modelling the degradation process in order to estimate the future behavior. Although many signal processing and data-driven methods have been proposed to construct the HI, most of the existing methods are based on manual feature extraction techniques and require the prior knowledge of experts, or rely on a large amount of failure data. Therefore, in this study, a new data-driven method based on the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) is presented to construct the HI. For this purpose, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) technique was used to convert the raw acquired vibrational signals into a two-dimensional image; then, the CAE model was trained by the healthy operation dataset. Finally, the Mahalanobis distance (MD) between the healthy and failure stages was measured as the HI. The proposed method was tested on a benchmark bearing dataset and compared with several other traditional HI construction models. Experimental results indicate that the constructed HI exhibited a monotonically increasing degradation trend and had good performance in terms of detecting incipient faults.


Author(s):  
Luc Keizers ◽  
Richard Loendersloot ◽  
Tiedo Tinga

Prognostics gained a lot of research attention over the last decade, not the least due to the rise of data-driven prediction models. Also hybrid approaches are being developed that combine physics-based and data-driven models for better performance. However, limited attention is given to prognostics for varying operational and environmental conditions. In fact, varying operational and environmental conditions can significantly influence the remaining useful life of assets. A powerful hybrid tool for prognostics is Bayesian filtering, where a physical degradation model is updated based on realtime data. Although these types of filters are widely studied for prognostics, application for assets in varying conditions is rarely considered in literature. In this paper, it is proposed to apply an unscented Kalman filter for prognostics under varying operational conditions. Four scenarios are described in which a distinction is made between the level in which real-time and future loads are known and between short-term and long-term prognostics. The method is demonstrated on an artificial crack growth case study with frequently changing stress ranges in two different stress profiles. After this specific case, the generic application of the method is discussed. A positioning diagram is presented, indicating in which situations the proposed filter is useful and feasible. It is demonstrated that incorporation of physical knowledge can lead to highly accurate prognostics due to a degradation model in which uncertainty in model parameters is reduced. It is also demonstrated that in case of limited physical knowledge, data can compensate for missing physics to yield reasonable predictions.


Author(s):  
Shah M. Limon ◽  
Om Prakash Yadav

Prediction of remaining useful life using the field monitored performance data provides a more realistic estimate of life and helps develop a better asset management plan. The field performance can be monitored (indirectly) by observing the degradation of the quality characteristics of a product. This paper considers the gamma process to model the degradation behavior of the product characteristics. An integrated Bayesian approach is proposed to estimate the remaining useful life that considers accelerated degradation data to model degradation behavior first. The proposed approach also considers interaction effects in a multi-stress scenario impacting the degradation process. To reduces the computational complexity, posterior distributions are estimated using the MCMC simulation technique. The proposed method has been demonstrated with an LED case example and results show the superiority of Bayesian-based RUL estimation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanshu Sharma ◽  
Veronica Adetola ◽  
Laurentiu Marinovici ◽  
Herbert T. Schaef

Abstract Due to the increased penetration of renewable energy generation sources, and fluctuations of the oil and gas prices, modern coal burning power plants deal with increased variability in the demand for power generation. These varying demands result in their intermittent under-capacity operation (cycling). Periodical ramping down and back up to follow the daily power demands causes damages to the plant components reducing its operational life. In this paper we analyze the impact of cycling on a rotary Ljungstrom air preheater (APH) unit installed at a coal fire power plant in the US. An inefficient air preheater can significantly impact boiler performance. Due to the repeated boiler’s hot-cold start, the APH experiences fluctuating operating conditions that result in accelerated degradation mechanisms, such as dew-point corrosion, fouling/deposition plugging, and air heater leakage. The analysis in this paper utilizes field data related to APH basket replacement, and the number of cycles experienced by the boiler to model the life expectancy of the baskets. The data-driven model enables preventive maintenance strategies for the APH by predicting how long the APH baskets will last in a probabilistic sense. The analysis showed that an increase in cycling for a fixed operation time can reduce the APH basket remaining useful life by about 30%.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Belov ◽  
Samba BA ◽  
Ji Tang Liu ◽  
Anton Kolyshkin ◽  
Sergio Daniel Rocchio

Abstract Mud motors are widely used for directional and performance drilling. Due to the extremely challenging operating conditions, they are prone to failures, resulting in unnecessary maintenance repair costs as well as unpredictable and very costly drilling failure. Until now, the oil and gas industry has lacked reliable procedures to monitor and maintain the health of the mud motor power sections. Recently, we systematically addressed this problem with an industry unique prognostic health management solution, which not only tracks remaining useful life (RUL), but also creates a new failure prevention scheme for operators. The key objective of this solution is to reduce maintenance costs and improve mud motor fleet reliability. It's based on a high-fidelity model and uses a hybrid approach by combining a high-fidelity physics-based model of a power section and data-driven approaches with machine learning techniques for real-time applications. The new methodology was tested in the field with great success. The verification of the created solution was completed based on numerous field data from Saudi Arabia and Argentina. Comparison of the predicted mud motor fatigue values with the actual observed post-job conditions and job failures demonstrated high fidelity of the developed models. The whole solution is currently being integrated into a drilling platform including the maintenance system, the well construction planning, and the execution. The first application of the workflow was deployed in the field in Colombia targeting reduction of maintenance cost and failure avoidance. The result was outstanding, with the initial deployment bringing about 27% of projected yearly maintenance savings and 10% of projected yearly failure reduction. It enables using the equipment to the full extent with increased drilling performance without sacrificing reliability. In addition, it optimizes the entire fleet management with reduced cost of logistics and maintenance. The findings of this paper demonstrate the value of the mud motor PHM solution for the oil and gas industry by providing accurate prognosis of power section health, leading to reduced costs, minimized NPT, and increased operational reliability.


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