Asset Aging Through Degradation Mechanism

Abstract

Analysis of the degradation process is one of the lately developed approaches in order to obtain the information regarding the asset condition especially for highly reliable systems, critical assets, and recently developed products. Application of the degradation methods has been newly increased due to their ability to predict and keep track of the dynamic conditions of the systems. The main purpose of the degradation-based models is to predict the future condition of the asset based on the behavior of the degradation indicator, time, and explanatory variables. On the other hand, maintenance activities can be scheduled in an optimized time window before the actual failure of the system with respect to the degradation profile of the assets. Since the degradation-based analysis defines the failure events based on the predefined threshold and critical limits, the failure is said to have occurred as a soft failure. It should be considered that some types of degradation mechanisms can be measured or observed with less effort compared to other types. For instance, the degradation mechanism due to the length of the crack can be easily monitored by measuring the crack length, while the degradation mechanism due to the loss of power efficiency of a transformer cannot be observed as easy as crack length. Therefore, obtaining the degradation profile can be considered as one of the challenges of the analysis. It should be noted that each asset might have more than one degradation mechanism. The main purpose of the most recent studies is to develop degradation-based models to predict the critical time for initiating the maintenance actions. The analyses mostly focus on the critical components rather than all components of the systems.