With the increased adoption of electrical actuators, pumps and valves in more-electric aircraft, the failure of an SMPS has a greater impact on overall aircraft safety. As power and operating temperature requirements are increasing, conventional prognostic techniques, which rely upon measurement of accessible parameters, have not been adequate to provide an accurate SMPS time-to-failure (TTF) prediction. In the absence of reliable predictive prognostics, redundancy is the only solution to reliability and safety. The additional space, weight and cost requirements for this redundancy make more-electric UAVs and lighter aircraft designs impractical. American Systems Technology, Inc. (ASTI) proposes to develop a prognostic algorithm that will provide more accurate time-to failure predictions for SMPS components. In addition to conventional threshold, leakage, and conductance parameters, ASTI proposes to utilize Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) and other techniques that have potential to predict catastrophic failure well in advance. TDR techniques hold promise in the determination of aging information when components have failure modes that are not recognizable using conventional techniques. Our research approach will be useful for future Prognostic Health Management (PHM) and electronics subsystem design tools which should enable greater design resiliency and minimal redundancy for high temperature SMPS applications.
