Hybrid prognostic approach for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems

This paper presents a hybrid prognostic approach which is applied on electro-thermally actuated MEMS valve. The method can be applied on different categories of MEMS to assess their health state, calculate the remaining useful life (RUL) and take appropriate decisions to anticipate the failures. In this paper a detailed description of the proposed method is presented. It consists of combining both degradation and nominal behavior models in order to estimate the current and future MEMS health states. A test bed for several MEMS is designed to acquire data in relation with the health state of the MEMS. The data processing obtained with this platform aims at deriving degradation models. Physical modeling is used to build the nominal behavior model of the valve. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method and in order to validate the implementation of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) models on MEMS, two simulated degradations of the valve MEMS are considered.