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IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter Vol. 56, No. 3. August 2010 |
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Table of Content Front page: Society News: Feature Article: Chapter Activities:
Technical Activities: Announcements:
Security and Privacy Magazine:
Call for Papers |
2011 is an Excellent Year For PHM! The Reliability Society will be sponsoring two system Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Conferences in 2011. - The first conference is the 2011 Prognostics and System Health Management Conference being held on May 24-25, 2011, in Shenzhen, China (http://www.cityu.edu.hk/phmc/PHM2011.htm) - The second conference is the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management being held on June 20-23, 2011, in Denver, Colorado, at the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center (http://www.phmconf.org/). The conference will emphasize enhancing safety, efficiency, availability, and effectiveness of systems through PHM technology and application. The Reliability Society is expanding its scope to include the interrelated Specialty Engineering aspects which support or enhance the overall reliability effectivity.
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is a technology to enhance the effective reliability and availability of a product in its life‐cycle conditions by detection of current and approaching failures and by providing for mitigation of the system risks. Prognostics is the real-time enhancement of reliability and availability and the prediction of the remaining useful life of the product by assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product's monitored parameters from its expected normal operating conditions. Prognostics can yield an advance warning of impending failure in a system, thereby enabling more efficient and effective maintenance and corrective actions. Prognostics helps in preventing catastrophic failures and can reduce unscheduled maintenance expenses. The outputs of a prognostic assessment of a product are the failure risk, time to failure, remaining useful life, and a prognostic distance within which maintenance and repair actions can be planned, in order to minimize their impact on product availability. Health Management is the process of using diagnostic and prognostic information to intelligently manage the use and maintenance of a system. The ultimate result is increased effective reliability, availability, and safety with reduced logistics and support costs.
In recent years, Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) has revolutionized the perception of product reliability and has resulted in a broad range of applications. Digital electronics are found in numerous facets of modern day life where consumers of all types of electronic utilization from cell phones to automobiles have come to depend on their reliability to operate effectively in both professional and private life. Furthermore, the commercial and military markets demand even greater reliability constraints on semiconductor manufactures where a system failure could produce catastrophic results. As a result, there is a strong need for a major change in reliability towards system health (degradation) assessment, fault diagnostics (detection and identification of the source of a failure), and prognostics (the real-time enhancement of reliability and the prediction of the remaining useful life of system components) of electronics-rich systems. There is also a special need to address soft faults and intermittent failures which are most common forms of those more difficult to diagnose failures. The computer and telecom industry leaders are investing in prognostics and system health management research as a viable cost-effective solution in response to the demands for more affordable and reliable systems suitable for complex, environmentally stressful, life cycle conditions. Cloud Computing and Computer users expect high reliability and availability from their computers / computer systems, and the goal of PHM is to minimize the possibility of losing data due to faulty operation, degradation of the electronics in a computer / computer system, no fault found (NFF) problems, and degradation or loss of computer usage for critical applications. The Manufacturing Industry applies PHM to manufacturing processes and equipment management as a key part of a proactive maintenance thrust that began several years ago. This was a natural outcropping of preventive maintenance to performance-based maintenance, and finally to proactive maintenance. The cost / benefit advantages are quite striking — savings in maintenance and spares costs, elimination of line stoppages, and product quality / reliability / availability improvements. Diagnostics has been applied to Aerospace and Military systems for more than 20 years. In recent years, PHM has been added to diagnostics in the drive to extend operational availability and to minimize logistics and support costs. PHM is being applied to allow support concepts to move from preventive maintenance to condition-based maintenance, eliminating unnecessary inspections and maintenance actions on healthy systems. The key to applying PHM to Avionics and Military systems is the combination of technology for highly reliable and accurate sensors, algorithms and software design for diagnostics, prognostics, and health management, and definition and development of the integrated environment that uses and matures the PHM capability, with the end result being a much more operationally reliable and cost effective system. PHM could have enormous benefits for Power Smart Grid and Green Energy Systems like wind turbine devices in terms of production, reliability, and maintenance. The objective of PHM for Wind Energy is the development of an autonomous health management system to control components in wind turbines, especially for a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). It consists of intelligent in-situ monitoring, fault isolation and location (diagnostics), performance degradation prediction, and remaining useful life assessment (prognostics). PHM can also ensure LED Lighting Systems availability through extension of maintenance cycles; the lowering of life cycle costs by reducing inspection costs, repairs, downtime, and inventory; reducing the frequency of intermittent failures; providing advanced warning of system failures; enabling predictive maintenance to forestall failures; and obtaining load history data for future design purposes.
Place on your calendar and plan to attend one of the conferences to gain useful PHM knowledge and technology. Dennis Hoffman
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