Power supply health management — deploying prognostics technology for enhanced weapon system depot support

Recent technical advances in assessing power supply degradation have spawned new capabilities for deploying electronics health management systems (HMS). The work described herein has extended and matured previous efforts by the authors. A methodology for implementing health monitoring for switched-mode power supplies was outlined in . The authors present the integration of power supply characterization techniques into an automated test package as a depot-level use case and outline the development of O-level and embedded implementations in support of the verticality of test philosophy. We also discuss the future work efforts being pursued to implement the power supply HMS technology within the maintenance infrastructure, and to further enhance the technology through remaining useful life (RUL) studies and new techniques for accelerated test. Finally, a real-world cost benefit is presented for a critical avionic system to justify technology adoption due to its positive impact on availability, maintenance support and return on investment.