Incipient Failure Detection: A Particle Filtering Approach with Application to Actuator Systems

The background, simulation and experimental evaluation of an anomaly detector for Brushless DC motor winding faults is described in this paper in the context of an aircraft Electro-Mechanical Actuator (EMA) application. Results acquired from an internal Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) study identified turn-to-turn winding faults as the primary mechanism, or mode, of failure. Physics-of failure mechanisms used to develop a model for the identified fault are provided. Then, an experimental test procedure was devised and executed to validate the model. Additionally, a diagnostic feature, identified by the fault model and derived using Hilbert transform theory, was validated using the system model and experimental data for several fault dimensions. Next, a feature extraction routine preprocesses monitoring parameters and passes the resulting features to a particle filter. The particle filter, based on Bayesian estimation theory, allows for representation and management of uncertainty in a computationally efficient manner. The resulting anomaly detection routine declares a fault only when a specified confidence level is reached at a given false alarm rate. Finally, the real-time performance of the anomaly detector is evaluated using LabVIEW.