Intermittent wiring fault detection and diagnosis for SSPC based aircraft power distribution system

Intermittent wiring faults may happen in aircraft power systems in an unpredictable manner when degraded wires are wet, vibrating against metal structures, or under mechanical stress, etc. They could evolve into serious faults that may cause catastrophic incidents and thus have raised much concern. In this paper, the AB CD method is introduced to derive normal and faulty wire models with reduced complexity compared to conventional differential equation approaches. An intermittent fault detection method is proposed based on estimation of the load circuit model coefficients and parameters utilizing the spectrum information of the high-frequency signals associated with intermittent wiring faults. Furthermore, based on the faulty wiring model, a genetic algorithm is proposed to estimate the fault related wiring parameters such as fault location and resistance. The feasibility of the proposed methods has been verified by simulations.