The potential benefits from the successful completion of this program are enormous and will significantly impact the way critical aerospace, power devices, controllers, and other systems are designed and operated. Examples of key customers that could benefit through use of the developed technologies include: commercial airlines, power semiconductor device and drive manufacturers, land and marine propulsion systems, unmanned air vehicles, JSF, future combat systems, industrial actuation systems, and robotic applications. Particularly, the push towards fly-by-wire control system implementation in the commercial airlines by manufacturers like Boeing have specific requirements on health management performance for which these technologies can provide value by increasing reliability and safety for critical components. The prognostics-enhanced motor/ electro-mechanical actuator control will be of great interest to these manufacturers. Furthermore, for the power drive manufacturers, implementing the technologies developed through this program will enhance the fault detection and mitigation for power devices and motor/actuator applications. The development of the proposed prognostics & fault tolerant reconfiguration strategies will directly contribute to NASA's IVHM and IRAC efforts. The proposed technologies are applicable to future generation aviation platforms, leading to benefits in the form of improved reliability, maintainability, and survivability of safety-critical electro-mechanical systems. The long term implications of a successful completion of this program will provide reliability tools for the state-of-the-art technologies such as the advanced fly-by-wire aircraft and Intelligent Flight Control Systems. A lot of NASA's NextGen and current activities can take immediate advantage of these technologies. In short term, the motor/actuator modeling and reconfigurable strategies to be developed in this program can be directly transitioned to some ongoing research work at the Prognostics Center of Excellence of NASA Ames. The adaptable nature of modules presented in this program will allow them to act as design and development tools for a wide variety of NASA applications.
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