Design and Implementation of a Prognostic and Health Monitoring System for the Power Electronics Converter of a FEV Powertrain

Abstract

Prognostic and Health Monitoring Systems (PHMS) have increased their importance in the last years. Safety critical applications, such as: nuclear power plants, aerospace, railway or automotive industries, have found that PHMS increases overall system reliability and safety while reducing maintenance costs. The objective of PHMS is to determine the health state of the components under study, being able to predict their Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in order to implement advanced maintenance policies. This allows to further exploit component’s life before replacement. The increased number and variety of sensors introduced both in mechanical and electrical systems, together with the development of advanced algorithms for data treatment, allow the implementation of PHMS in a wide range of applications. The introduction of Fully Electric Vehicles (FEV) in the mainstream, have raised concerns on their reliability, mainly, on their electric and electronic components. Automotive industry is specially affected by system failure due to their high impact on customer’s image of the brand. In fact, the employment of Permanent Magnet Motors and Pulse Width Modulation inverters on new environments in which they have not been intensively tested, such as the automotive industry, suggests FEVs are candidates for PHMS implementation. In this work, a methodology was developed for PHMS implementation in FEV powertrain. A case study has been carried out on the power electronics converter to validate and test the methodology. The main contributions of this work are the discovery of failure precursor parameters and the prediction of the RUL of the components under study.