A New Life Prediction Scheme for Mechanical System with Considering the Mission Profile Switching

The life prediction is crucial to guarantee the reliability and safety of the mechanical system. The current prediction methods predict the life only based on the historical usage pattern of the mechanical system, and do not consider the mission profile of the future working process. To realize the life prediction with considering the switching of mission profile, which is composed of different operating conditions, this paper proposes a new prediction scheme on the base of the similarity trajectory method (STM). Two main improvements are employed. First, the reference degradation models are constructed according to the predicted trend of each constant operating condition obtained by the relevance vector machine (RVM). Secondly, the life under specific mission profile is calculated through weighted aggregating the life of each constant operating condition. The proposed method is validated by a turbofan engine simulation data. The results show that the proposed method achieves an excellent predicted result, in which the predicted result is close to the actual result. In addition, the proposed method can deal with the problem of mission profile switching.