Prognostic and Fault Tolerant Reconfiguration Strategies for Aerospace Power Electronic Controllers and Electric Machines

Impact Technologies has proposed development of a real-time prognostic and fault accommodation system for power converters and electro-mechanical (EM) drive applications. The main goal for this program is development of techniques that enable fault tolerant control based on diagnostic features from the coil winding and power transistors. During Phase I, Impact achieved substantial and promising results in three main technical areas that provide opportunities to maturing tools that enable PHM and reconfiguration techniques. The technical areas include: Transistor Performance, Motor/Actuator Performance, and Fault Tolerant Reconfiguration. During Phase II, a significant effort will be employed to further develop the automated ringing feature extraction feature, leakage current sensing capabilities, and reconfiguration techniques for continued motor operation. These efforts will lead to development of prototype sensors for IGBT aging detection and current leakage detection as a health indicator of aging effects in power drives. Moreover, Impact will demonstrate reconfigurable control techniques for fault accommodations in EM applications. The long term implications of a successful completion of this program will provide reliability and health management tools for mission and safety critical applications for NASA, commercial, and military enterprises.

The potential benefits from the successful completion of this program are enormous and will significantly impact the way critical aerospace, power devices, controllers, and other systems are designed and operated. Examples of key customers that could benefit through use of the developed technologies include: commercial airlines, power semiconductor device and drive manufacturers, land and marine propulsion systems, unmanned air vehicles, JSF, future combat systems, industrial actuation systems, and robotic applications. Particularly, the push towards fly-by-wire control system implementation in the commercial airlines by manufacturers like Boeing have specific requirements on health management performance for which these technologies can provide value by increasing reliability and safety for critical components. The prognostics-enhanced motor/ electro-mechanical actuator control will be of great interest to these manufacturers. Furthermore, for the power drive manufacturers, implementing the technologies developed through this program will enhance the fault detection and mitigation for power devices and motor/actuator applications.

The development of the proposed prognostics & fault tolerant reconfiguration strategies will directly contribute to NASA's IVHM and IRAC efforts. The proposed technologies are applicable to future generation aviation platforms, leading to benefits in the form of improved reliability, maintainability, and survivability of safety-critical electro-mechanical systems. The long term implications of a successful completion of this program will provide reliability tools for the state-of-the-art technologies such as the advanced fly-by-wire aircraft and Intelligent Flight Control Systems. A lot of NASA's NextGen and current activities can take immediate advantage of these technologies. In short term, the motor/actuator modeling and reconfigurable strategies to be developed in this program can be directly transitioned to some ongoing research work at the Prognostics Center of Excellence of NASA Ames. The adaptable nature of modules presented in this program will allow them to act as design and development tools for a wide variety of NASA applications.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.