Prognostics and Health Management for Aircraft Batteries

Impact Technologies, in collaboration with the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory, proposes to develop and demonstrate a prognostic health management system for aircraft batteries that accounts for environmental effects, charge/discharge characteristics, and directly compensates for battery design. A feature processing methodology will be implemented with several automated reasoning approaches to determine the State-of-Charge of the battery under a range of conditions. Diagnostic routines will assess the likelihood and severity of battery failure modes by relating current values to known health regions in feature space and producing a suitable ranking. These health states will then be projected to known failure regions, using the planned usage/operation of the battery, to determine the remaining discharge time and useful life remaining. In addition, a usage-based approach will complement this core feature-based prognostics methodology and fusion will be used to provide a robust prediction with reportable accuracy metrics. Implementation of this technology will give clear insight into the battery health and allow proper maintenance to be efficiently planned and correctly performed. Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture and associated hardware/software elements. Phase II will address a full development program, transition plan, and verification strategy consistent with NAVAIR needs in rotary and fixed wing assets.