Performance degradation assessment for aircraft environmental control system: A method based on visual cognition

The aircraft environmental control system (AECS) plays a vital role in the normal operation of an airplane; thus, performance degradation of the AECS may result in failure and even catastrophic consequences. Because performance degradation is inevitable, performance degradation assessment is critical to provide information for appropriate maintenance actions. This paper proposed an integrated framework for performance degradation assessment of AECS by introducing the visual cognition theory into the specific method. First, an observer is used to generate a residual error, which contains degradation information of the AECS. Second, the generated residual error is transformed into a two-dimensional image based on a permutation method. Third, inspired by the multichannel characteristic (MCC), the transformed image is decomposed into several subbands based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NCST) for multiscale and multidirectional feature extraction, thus capturing the precise characteristics of degradation. Then, inspired by the manifold sensing characteristic (MSC), the manifold space is established based on diffusion maps (DM) to reveal the intrinsic evolutionary law of health degradation. Finally, the geodesic distance is employed to represent the deviation between the current state and health baseline. As a health indicator, the confidence value (CV), which is derived from the geodesic distance, is capable of representing the degradation trend of the AECS. The whole process of degradation can be tracked in real time based on the proposed method. An AECS simulation model was established in MATLAB/Simulink, and two typical faults were introduced. The results based on simulation data demonstrate that the proposed assessment method can effectively reflect the degradation process of the AECS and the constructed health indicator is reasonable.