AUTOMATED HANDLING EQUIPMENT PROGNOSTICS UTILIZING DAMAGE ACCUMULATION MODELS

摘要

BAE Systems Land & Armaments L.P. (hereinafter BAE Systems) is a contractor for the US Army's Future Combat System (FCS) Program. The FCS Program requires a Mean Time Between System Aborts (MTBSA) significantly higher than that achieved on any fielded Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV). The MTBSA at the vehicle level is decomposed into an allocation for each subsystem of the vehicle. This allocation becomes that subsystem's requirement. Prognostics utilized for replacement of a subsystem's component prior to failure extends the subsystem's life. If failure of that component would have caused a system abort then the subsystem MTBSA would be increased. In order to use prognostics, the point where the subsystem will fail must be predictable. This paper will describe the method developed by BAE Systems in collaboration with Angeles Crest Engineering Inc. (ACEI) to prognosticate system abort failures far enough in advance to allow the subsystem to be repaired prior to the failure occurring. This method uses data extracted from sensors placed throughout the automated handling subsystem to estimate damage accumulation, which is continuously updated to reflect the actual service history, e.g. loads and environments. The damage accumulation feeds a Probabilistic Failure Analysis (PFA) model which predicts probabilistically the end of life of the components.