Remaining useful life prediction of aviation circular electrical connectors using vibration-induced physical model and particle filtering method

Abstract

The reliability of electrical connectors has a critical impact on electrical systems. Traditionally, this has been characterized by the failure-rate prediction value according to MIL-HDBK-217 in engineering practice. Owing to the limitations and misleading results provided by this approach, a new remaining useful life (RUL) prediction method is presented. This method is aimed at the mechanism of increasing oxide film thickness induced by vibration, which leads to an increase in contact resistance. Moreover, the prediction method is based on failure mechanisms and particle filters, which realizes the combination of a physical model and data-driven method. The particle filters can abundantly employ degradation data and avoid ignoring the failure mechanism. Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) is proposed for effectively assessing the proposed prediction method, in which the random vibration is selected as the accelerated stress. Moreover, the differences in manufacturing processes are considered in the testing. The RULs of circular electrical connectors in two manufacturing processes are obtained under high vibration stress through ADT and data gained from tests. The prediction results are compared with other methods to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed prediction method.