Electronic Circuit PHM with No Data

Abstract

Operational data from the target system is widely considered a pre-requisite for implementation of PHM, as it used as training data. Often this data is not available to PHM practitioners because health monitoring capabilities may not be installed in legacy systems unless there is a guarantee that a PHM framework will be viable/profitable. This research presents an approach in which PHM can be implemented without any operational data and is generic enough to be applied to any electronic circuit provided a simulation model of the system with acceptable fidelity can be developed. The research also introduces the Space-Filling Design, which can be used to generate the training data in a systematic, statistically valid framework, and is especially valuable for complex circuit with a large number of components. This design provides sufficient coverage of the parametric design space to be representative of the unavailable operational data, as well as incorporating the effects of parameter interaction on the simulated response of the system. Most PHM studies in literature ignore the effect of the degradation of interacting components. We show, how such an assumption can lead to incorrect fault diagnosis/RUL estimation and propose methods to screen for two-way and higher order interactions. Finally, we use various deep learning approaches in conjunction with physics-of-failure models for individual components to diagnose circuit faults and estimate circuit RUL. This simulation-based fusion prognostics approach is a holistic framework for all types of electronic circuits.