Prognostics and Health Monitoring for an electro-hydraulic flight control actuator

A model-based approach to prognostics and health monitoring (PHM) for an electro-hydraulic flight control actuator is presented. The aim of this paper is to show a model-based methodology to detect, diagnose and prognosticate a fault in an electro-hydraulic primary flight control actuator that precedes an imminent failure. The model-based approach is versatile and can be easily applied on another system, whose model is available. The PHM solution proposed is dedicated to health monitoring and failure prediction of a generic primary flight control actuator. This model-based approach systematically assesses health state and the remaining useful life (RUL) and consists of developing a model of the system for different flight conditions, the introduction of the failure mode. The RUL calculated is a time-to-failure whose confidence level depends on several conditions, such as model fidelity, sensor noise and precision of the data recorder.