Diagnosing Incipient Faults for a Faster Adoption of Sustainable Aerospace Technologies

Next-generation aircraft require the development and integration of a deal of innovative green technologies to meet the ambitious sustainability goals set for aviation. Those transformational efforts are associated with a tremendous increase in the complexity of the onboard systems and their multiphysics-coupled behaviors and dynamics. A critical aspect relates to the identification of the coupled faults resulting from the integration of those green technologies, which introduce damage identifiability issues and demand new approaches for the efficient and accurate identification of non-nominal fault conditions. Model-based fault detection and identification (FDI) methodologies have been proven essential to identify onboard the damages affecting the systems from physical signal acquisitions, but existing methods are typically computationally expensive and fail to capture incipient coupled faults, which prevents their adoption and scaling with the increasing complexity of novel multiphysics systems. This work introduces a multifidelity framework to accelerate the identification of fault modes affecting complex systems. An original two-stage compression computes an optimally informative and highly reduced representation of the monitoring signals for the minimum demand of onboard resources. A multifidelity scheme for Bayesian inversion is developed to infer multidomain fault parameters from the compressed signals: variable cost and fidelity models are optimally queried for a major reduction of the overall computational expense. The framework is demonstrated and validated for aerospace electromechanical actuators affected by incipient multimodal faults. Remarkable accelerations of the FDI procedure are observed, and the exact identification of the incipient fault condition was achieved one order of magnitude faster than with standard algorithms.