System reliability assessment based on energy dissipation: Modeling and application in electro-hydrostatic actuation system

This paper addresses a new reliability model, based on energy dissipation, considering performance degradation behaviors. Different from the two-state reliability model and traditional reliability model based on failure rate statistics, this paper focuses on the component energy loss due to its fault evolution, such as fatigue, aging and wear, and presents a reliability model based on the component’s energy dissipation, as well as establishing a power dissipation constrained reliability model for degradation-based reliability assessment. As a demonstration, the proposed method is applied to model and evaluate the failure behavior of the electro-hydrostatic actuation system. The results indicate that the proposed method is effective in describing its life-cycle degradation in the energy field, and provides a reliability assessment based on energy dissipation.