Embedded prognostics and health monitoring systems

For many years, autonomous electronic devices have been developed to monitor the environment of systems, store their behaviour and send warnings upon exceeded thresholds previously defined. However, the trend is to further analyse these data to take into account the aging and damage accumulation in order to better assess the reliability of the monitored systems, depending of their real environmental life profile. Thus, the aim is to make a diagnostic or health status of the systems and evaluate their remaining life for a predictive maintenance. This paper shows that normalized or standardized Life Assessment Monitoring Systems (LAMS) may be developed and used for very different applications of onboard and real-time PHM (Prognostics Health Management) approaches. The goal is to make use of common electronic components: microcontroller, memories and sensors. However, dedicated embedded software has been developed for environmental data computations to predict the life expectancy of systems. These LAMSs can use field return results or simulation results to make electronic prognostics, assess the length of cracks in hidden metallic structures or track the progression of a moving system with a GPS module and send regular reports and warnings by SMS through a GSM module.