Digital Electronics Health Prognosis

A comprehensive Air System PHM approach will be developed for avionics digital circuits. As a mission is flown, temperature and vibration data indicate the stresses imposed on the electronics. This technology translates global stresses onto individual circuit board components and even the materials that make up those components. Based on VEXTEC proprietary material degradation physics modeling component degradation is predicted. Overall electronics life is a function of the combination of individual component lives considering interactions. This Phase II will develop a PHM solution with core physics of failure models for the F136 FADEC. It will be designed to segregate impending failure from intermittent fault prediction. The electronics damage state directly affects the number and frequency of operating intermittent faults which is evaluated by the model and used to predict the probability of an intermittent fault for missions to come. Bayesian updating within the prognostic algorithm will provide confidence in the model outputs. This SBIR work will facilitate in launch of FEA-based tool for electronics design. In parallel, VEXTEC will develop a PHM algorithm for an already developed FADEC.