A machine learning-based clustering approach to diagnose multi-component degradation of aircraft fuel systems

Accurate fault diagnosis and prognosis can significantly reduce maintenance costs, increase the safety and availability of engineering systems that have become increasingly complex. It has been observed that very limited researches have been reported on fault diagnosis where multi-component degradation are presented. This is essentially a challenging Complex Systems problem where features multiple components interacting simultaneously and nonlinearly with each other and its environment on multiple levels. Even the degradation of a single component can lead to a misidentification of the fault severity level. This paper introduces a new test rig to simulate the multi-component degradation of the aircraft fuel system. A machine learning-based data analytical approach based on the classification of clustering features from both time and frequency domains is proposed. The scope of this framework is the identification of the location and severity of not only the system fault but also the multi-component degradation. The results illustrate that (a) the fault can be detected with accuracy > 99%; (b) the severity of fault can be identified with an accuracy of almost 100%; (c) the degradation level can be successfully identified with the R-square value > 0.9.