Prof. Kwok L. Tsui's Quality Talk in CityU 30th Anniversary Technology Forum

I attended Prof. Tsui Kwok Leung’s presentation in CityU 30th Anniversary Technology forum on 24 Sep 2014 entitled “Advanced Manufacturing”. Prof. Tsui’s talk named “A Quality Journey: From Manufacturing to Field Operation with PHM”.

Firstly, Prof. Tsui reviewed how statistical methods for improving Manufacturing Quality included Reliability, Design of Experiments, Statistical Process Control and Sampling Inspection. Then advancement of technology improved from Production Quality to Operation Quality. Those technology advancement included Computation Power (Real Time Data Processing and Computation Capability), Data Collection, Sophisticated Modeling Advancement, and Improving Prediction Capability for Population to Individuals.

Then Prof. Tsui introduced what different using Prognostics and System Health Management (PHM) for improving Operation Quality compared with old one.

Prof. Tsui explained why PHM needs through discussion of consequences of system failure. Many major failures caused significant failure impact which not only consider money but life! For instance, Toyota case happened may be because of complex information system, rare events, very intermittent and electronics No Fault Found (NFF). He proposed to use PHM approach to solve it.

The Objectives of PHM (Pecht):
1. Eliminate unexpected/unscheduled down-time of information systems caused by failures of electronic hardware and software.
2. Develop the technology for self-cognizant electronic systems that can recognize their own health and take autonomous corrective action, thus resulting in ‘personalized health-management’ strategies.

Finally, Prof. Tsui explained PHM through two examples. There were a Simple Bearing and Rechargeable Battery. It observed the process known as degradation.

However, I was more interested in another case named Battery Degradation. Prof. Tsui’s research had three objectives below:
1. To identify data-driven technology, and hence track the battery degradation trend for fusion prognostics.
2. To develop models to evaluate the battery status & predict the remaining useful performance – State of Health (SOH) regarding to external stress, under various current load.
3. To develop models to understand capacity behavior and to estimate State of Charge (SOC) under various conditions.

For SOC study, two experiments were performed and they were Dynamic Stress Test (DST) and Federal Urban Driving Schedule (FUDS).

Reference:
CityU 30th Anniversary Homepage - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/cityu30/index.htm
CityU SEEM Department - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/seem/
CityU Engineering Doctorate Society - http://www.engd.org/