Remaining Useful Life Estimation Based on Detection of Explosive Changes: Analysis of Bearing Vibration

The monitoring of condition variables for maintenance purposes is a growing trend amongst researchers and practitioners where decisions are based on degradation levels. The two approaches in Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) are diagnosing the level of degradation (diagnostics) or predicting when a certain level of degradation will be reached (prognostics). Using diagnostics determines when it is necessary to perform maintenance, but it rarely allows for estimation of future degradation. In the second case, prognostics does allow for degradation and failure prediction, however, its major drawback lies in when to perform the analysis, and exactly what information should be used for predictions. This encumbrance is due to previous studies that have shown that degradation variable could undergo a change that misleads these calculations. This paper addresses the issue of identifying explosive changes in condition variables, using Control Charts, to determine when to perform a new model fitting in order to obtain more accurate Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimations. The diagnostic-prognostic methodology allows for discarding pre-change observations to avoid contamination in condition prediction. In addition the performance of the integration methodology is compared against adaptive autoregressive (AR) models. Results show that using only the observations acquired after the out-of-control signal produces more accurate RUL estimations.