An energy-based coupling degradation propagation model and its application to aviation actuation system

Abstract The degradation of components in complex mechatronic systems involves multiple physical processes which will cause coupling interactions among nodes in the system. The interaction of nodes may be carried out not only by physical connections but also by the environment which cannot be described by single network using the traditional methods. In order to give out a unified model to quantitatively describe the coupling degradation spreading by both physical connections and environment, a novel Energy-Flow-Field Network (EFFN) and a coupling degradation model based on EFFN are proposed in this paper. The EFFN is driven by energy flow and the state transition of spatially related nodes is triggered by the dissipation energy. An application is conducted on aviation actuation system in which the degradation spreading by fluid-thermal-solid interaction is considered. The degradation path and the most probable fault reason can be obtained by combining the state transition and energy output of nodes, which is consistent with the given scenario.