Structural Prognostics and Health Management in Power & Energy Systems

Dear Colleagues,

In order to ensure the safety and reliability of power and energy systems, including wind turbines, gas/steam turbines, power plants, etc., failure mechanism, reliability assessment, prognostics, and health management (PHM) have becoming recent developments in integrity analysis of these systems. For many countries, such as the European countries, England and the USA, currently facing a potential future mismatch from energy production and transformation, currently increasing interests are being paid on new techniques to discover and understand the remaining life and integrity assessment of power and energy systems.

To prevent any unexpected machine breakdowns and accidents, early faults of critical components in these systems should be detected as soon as possible. Once early faults of critical components are diagnosed, their performance degradation assessment and remaining useful life estimation should be conducted to maximize lifetime of power and energy systems. Moreover, due to unexpected ageing related degradations/damaging, mechanical properties, microstructures and structural resistance of systems/components often require stochastic considerations related to failure mechanism modeling and analysis. In addition, various sources of uncertainty/variability arising from a simplified representation of the actual physical process (often through semi-empirical or empirical models) and/or sparse information on manufacturing, material properties, and loading profiles contribute to stochastic behavior under operation.

Accordingly, continued improvements on PHM have been possible through advanced signature analysis, performance degradation assessment, as well as accurate modeling of failure mechanisms by introducing advanced mathematical approaches/tools. Through combining the deterministic and probabilistic modeling techniques, researches on PHM and structural health monitoring (SHM) can provide assurance for new structures at the design stage and ensure the integrity in the construction at the fabrication phase. Specifically, power and energy system failure occurs under multi-sources of uncertainty/variability, resulting from load variation in usages, material properties, geometry variations within tolerances, and other uncontrolled variations. Thus, advanced methods and applications for theoretical, numerical, and experimental contributions that address these issues on PHM are desired and expected, which attempts to prevent over-design and unnecessary inspection and provide the tools to enable a balance between safety and economy to be achieved.

The aim of this Special Issue would be to provide the data, models and tools necessary to performing PHM from structural to the system, resulting in the use of advanced mathematical, numerical and experimental techniques. Therefore, researchers are invited to provide original research and review articles that seek for accurate and efficient machine fault diagnosis and prognosis, remaining life assessment, condition-based maintenance, and so forth. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• wind/gas/steam turbine technologies
• power plant technologies
• failure mechanisms
• damage/degradation
• digital/adaptive signal processing
• statistical signal processing
• prognostics and health management
• probabilistic damage tolerance
• probabilistic physics of failure
• structural integrity assessment
• structural reliability
• reliability testing and statistics
• life prediction
• degradation modeling and analysis
• structural health monitoring
• system diagnostics

Dr. Dong Wang
Dr. Shun-Peng Zhu
Prof. Dr. Xiancheng Zhang
Prof. Dr. Gang Chen
Dr. José A.F.O. Correia
Dr. Guian Qian
Guest Editors

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