An Autonomous Health Monitoring System for Hybrid Propulsion Vehicles

Barron Associates, Inc. (BAI) and its subcontractor, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), propose to develop an autonomous health monitoring system capable of diagnosing system failures and predicting the remaining life of hybrid propulsion vehicle systems. The research and development effort will leverage BAI's generic diagnostic algorithms and SwRI's hybrid propulsion systems expertise and extensive testing facilities. For the diagnostic solution, BAI proposes a fault detection and isolation (FDI) methodology that it has developed for widespread application to complex dynamical systems. The FDI algorithm is able to detect and isolate sensor, actuator, and plant faults by exploiting analytic redundancy that exists among various subsets of available actuator input and sensor output data. In addition, predicting the time and distance that the remaining energy sources could sustain operation is possible using the state estimates provided by the diagnostic system. SwRI's latest generation of vehicle modeling software, which will be used as the Phase I development platform, is the Rapid Automotive Performance Testing and Optimization Resource (RAPTOR). RAPTOR is a modular modeling and development simulation tool for vehicle fuel economy, performance, and emissions in both virtual and hardware-in-the-loop environments. RAPTOR will be used to configure virtual hybrid propulsion military vehicles from existing component models.