Abstract
Reliability assessment is of great significance in ensuring the safety and reducing maintenance cost of equipment. The traditional statistical method is widely used to estimate the reliability of mass equipment; however, it cannot efficiently predict the overall reliability of single or small batch equipment due to lack of failure data. This paper introduced the operational reliability concept to describe the running condition of single or small batch equipment and proposed a method based on the combination of Relevance Vector Machines (RVMs) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to evaluate the operational reliability. Some representative characteristic indexes of operating equipment were firstly selected, and PCA was applied to obtain a hybrid index of the equipment’s running condition. Then, a RVM prediction model was trained to predict the development of the hybrid index and corresponding probability density function (PDF). Based on this, the operational reliability of the equipment was calculated by the interval integral defined by the failure threshold and the predicted value of the hybrid index. The approach was validated using the experimental test conducted on the aero-engine rotor bearings. The results show a good agreement in the evaluations of the failure time between the proposed method and the experimental test.
Highlights
Reliability assessment is of great significance in ensuring the safety and reducing maintenance cost of equipment
The reliability of equipment includes overall reliability and operational reliability. e former is obtained by statistical analysis of a large number of equipment failure data [1], and it reflects the overall reliability of the equipment throughout the lifetime. e latter is obtained from the performance degradation information of the equipment, and it reflects the real time reliability of the equipment [2]
E operational reliability of the equipment is evaluated based on the performance degradation information, which is normally extracted from the monitoring data of the equipment [6]. e operating condition information obtained from the monitoring data is supposed to effectively reflect the evolution process of the dynamic operating characteristics of the equipment
Summary
Reliability assessment is of great significance in ensuring the safety and reducing maintenance cost of equipment. The PCA method is used to combine several characteristic indexes into one hybrid index to increase the robustness and the accuracy of the operational reliability prediction. Ird, the operational reliability of the equipment is calculated by the interval integral defined by the failure threshold and the predicted value of the hybrid index. In this method, only the performance degradation information of the object equipment is required, and there is no any other information from the same type equipment used, so the method is suitable for the reliability estimation problem of single equipment.
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