Health index synthetization and remaining useful life estimation for turbofan engines based on run-to-failure datasets

Turbofan engines will gradually degrade until failure occurs or life ends if without maintenance. Reliable degradation assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation make sense on both aviation safety and rational maintenance decisions. This paper proposes a data-driven prognostic method on the premise of run-to-failure (RtF) data which are multivariate sensory data collected from the engines operating from normal to failure. After necessary pre-processing to the data, clustering analysis is executed to generate the clusters which represent the multi-states of the degradation process. The failure state cluster is extracted, and then the distance between the pre-processed data and the cluster is calculated. Therefore, one-dimensional time series are generated and defined as the health indices. Afterwards the degradation models are built based on the health indices. Finally, the RUL of a testing unit can be estimated by similarity analysis with the models. Hierarchical clustering (HC) and relevance vector machine (RVM) are the main algorithms employed in this paper. To validate the proposition, a case study is performed on turbofan engines data from Prognostics Center of Excellence (PCoE) at NASA Ames Research Center, and sufficient comparisons were given.