A Prognostic Technique for Vehicle Suspension Elements Using Degradation Measures

Conventional maintenance approaches, as reparative and preventive maintenance, are not enough to fulfill the needs of vehicle systems safely, costly and high accessibility. A new strategy based on measuring of systems degradation through a prognostic process is required. The recent advances in technology provide a combination of model-based diagnosis and prognosis of systems, leading to a condition-based maintenance and augmented availability of systems. With a precise simulation model of a system, diagnostics and prognostics can be mounted alongside with the system aims.

The work presented here is to develop an integrated prognostic process based on both, data collected from model-based simulations under nominal and degraded conditions, and measuring output signals of vehicle systems to determine their elements degradation coefficients. A vehicle suspension system uses in the paper as an application to foretell by events the weakness of its elements using the degradation measure. Results show that, the ride comfort is improved, and dynamic tire loads may be better, but suspension-working spaces are worse as the degradation measure increased that indicates the diseases.