A prognostics and health management method for instrumentation system remanufacturing

Remanufacturing can effectively help reduce the environmental burden considering that it reduces both the natural resources needed and the waste produced. Currently, remanufacturing has been widely applied in the process instrumentation industry. Considering that the instrumentation makes up the brain of a process operation, how to remanufacture instrumentation plays a decisive role in the safety and economy of a plant. However, challenges such as what is the best time to performing remanufacturing and what components should be replaced, are still not being addressed because the remanufacturing decision-making method is missing. Therefore, a prognostics and health management (PHM)-based method is proposed for instrumentation system remanufacturing in this paper. First, different categories of components are identified for in-situ monitoring using failure modes, mechanisms, and effects analysis (FMMEA). Then, a system-level performance index (PI) for each component is calculated based on the PHM techniques. Finally, the component health index for each component is achieved based on the corresponding system-level PI by an application-specific mapping model. The remaining useful life of the instrumentation can be optimally used, and thus the cost of remanufacturing can be minimized by using the method proposed.