Electronic Prognostics System Implementation on Power Actuator Components

Prognostics-enablement of power actuator components involves acquisition and processing of multiple data and sensor inputs. Data collection and fusion creates an accurate prognostic prediction. To that end, Ridgetop has developed an extensible Prognostic Analysis System Platform and a companion Prognostics Telemetry Harness. With an electro-mechanical actuator (EMA) as the focus, this paper describes the extensible architecture for a prognostics health management (PHM) system providing state of health (SoH) and remaining useful life´ (RUL) metrics. The key enabler is the ridgetop prognostics telemetry harness (RPTH), which collects and preprocesses signals relating to the health of dynamically executing components and subsystems. With an ultimate target of 100% up-time, prognostics is an effective tool for managing the corrective early actions required to avoid costly down-time events. An example is detailed using a common EMA and further analysis explores the return-on-investment justifying prognostics adoption.