Experiments for PHM: Needs, developments and challenges

Currently, the focus of reliability engineering has been extended from product design quality to product service, which drives the research on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) methodology to provide timely and reliable service information about the health status of product. However, traditional PHM technique mainly concentrates on usage information which leads to the shortcomings of prediction modelling problems, especially for high-reliability and long-life products. This paper proposed an experiment-based PHM life cycle framework, aiming to integrate information from the infield development phase to provide usage-oriented life prediction model set. When the on-line monitoring data is available, model set can be updated to acquire accurate prediction results and ensure effectively maintenance activity. In this paper, the life cycle is divided into seven stages and related modelling processes are given with specific case studies.