Towards an integrated reasoner for bearings prognostics

This paper describes an architecture and elements for an integrated prognostic bearings reasoner. The goal of the reasoner is to arrive at a reliable measure of damage accumulation, quantify its confidence, and aid in the assessment of remaining life. The reasoning integrates inflight and post-flight functions. During flight, the tasks are primarily diagnostic and assess damage in real time using input from a plurality of sources, both sensor-based and model-based. The damage assessment is further refined after conclusion of the flight with full-order models and additional information from historical failure data, operational data, and inspection data. Load profiles from future missions are used to calculate the damage propagation which will allow the reasoner to assess remaining life. This paper lays out the overall process and then focus in more detail on the in-flight reasoner. The operation of the architecture is demonstrated for bearing prognosis via an illustrative example