APU FMEA Validation and Its Application to Fault Identification

FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is a standard method to characterize and document product and process problems at the design phase. The FMEA is often delivered to the end user along with the product or system. However, once the system is deployed, the corresponding FMEA is rarely validated and updated. This is mainly due to the lack of method to validate and update FMEA. This paper argues that historical maintenance and operational data could be used to help address this problem. Building on data mining and database techniques, the paper introduces a FMEA validation and updating technique. The proposed technique derives statistics from real world historical operation and maintenance data and uses these statistics to update key FMEA parameters such as Failure Rate and Failure Mode Probability. The paper then shows how the validated FMEA can be used with data mining for fault detection and identification of root contributing component for a given failure mode or failure effect. The paper presents the developed methodology for FMEA validation and experimental results for fault identification. The results show that the updated FMEA can provide more reliable and accurate information that could benefit the decision-making process and improve maintenance efficiency.Copyright © 2010 by National Research Council of Canada