Real-Time Prognostic Health Management for Fault Tolerant Airborne Laser Systems

The proposed project will demonstrate the feasibility of developing a data driven prognostic fault tolerant smart weapon system concept for the Airborne Laser. A real-time prognostic health management (PHM) system will be developed to track the likelihoodof future system or subsystem failures and initiate or indicate appropriate actions to maintain or optimize system performance. A library of predictive algorithms will be employed to take large multi-dimensional data sets as input and provide advancedwarning of specific failure, fault and error events to help manage the health of the ABL in an automated way. A principal components approach is proposed to analyze and quantify the uncertainty of target fault signatures. An on-board Consequence Engineis proposed to achieve a real-time fault tolerant, self-healing, smart weapon system while maintaining high mission success probability. A preliminary prototype demonstration will be carried out on a system or subsystem identified by ACTA and Team ABL.The ABL weapon system offers many challenges in the predictive maintenance of its combat effectiveness, range and crew safety, airworthiness, and operational cost. A data driven real-time prognostic health management system can help meet these challengesby providing continuous health monitoring for fault tolerant systems using prognostic data. A prognostic system that enables self-awareness, self-healing, and self-health management is particularly important for mobile weapon systems such as the ABL. Aprognostic system provides vital information that can assist in refining the existing system or procuring future systems. Other potential applications involve predictive health management of critical assets such as a Space Based Laser (SBL) and GroundBased Laser (GBL), aircraft components, machinery, and industrial processes. The broad commercial potential of the predictive engines developed from this project will expand ACTA's capabilities in providing risk analysis and management services tocommercial and government clients. In addition, the technology acquired under this project will help ACTA to develop a Consequence Engine for the structural health monitoring system being developed for NASA.