Experimental Validation of a Prognostic Health Management System for Electro-Mechanical Actuators

Several hundred fault scenarios were created, using permutations of position and load profiles, as well as fault severity levels. The diagnostic system was tested extensively on these scenarios, with the test results demonstrating high accuracy and low numbers of false positive and false negative diagnoses. The prognostic system was utilized to track fault progression in some of the fault scenarios, predicting the remaining useful life of the actuator.

A series of run-to-failure experiments were conducted to validate its performance, with the resulting error in predicting time to failure generally lesser than 10% error. While a more robust validation procedure would require dozens more experiments executed under the same conditions (and, consequently, more test articles destroyed), the current results already demonstrate the potential for predicting fault progression in this type of devices.

More prognostic experiments are planned for the next phase of this work, including investigation and comparison of other prognostic algorithms (such as various types of Particle Filter and GPR), addition of new fault types, and execution of prognostic experiments in flight environment.