Digital twin driven prognostics and health management for complex equipment

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is crucial in the lifecycle monitoring of a product, especially for complex equipment working in a harsh environment. In order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of PHM, digital twin (DT), an emerging technology to achieve physical-virtual convergence, is proposed for complex equipment. A general DT for complex equipment is first constructed, then a new method using DT driven PHM is proposed, making effective use of the interaction mechanism and fused data of DT. A case study of a wind turbine is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of CIRP.