Assessment of industrial applicability of Electric Signature Analysis as diagnostic and prognostic tool

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is a maintenance program developed directly based on the equipment health condition. It consists of performing a periodic or continuous (on-line) condition monitoring of the equipment and subsequent fault diagnostics to recommend maintenance decisions. As a further evolution, prognostics aims at predicting the future trend of the equipment health condition and thus its remaining useful life. Even if CBM is promising for the expected benefits on the maintenance activities (i.e. it enables to avoid unnecessary maintenance tasks by taking actions only when there is evidence of abnormal behaviours of the physical asset), the implementation cost of monitoring technologies is an issue not to forget: this often may become a barrier preventing from the CBM program development. Even if today many instruments are available, in fact, their adoption by companies for monitoring is still limited. One reason is linked to the hardware and software costs, which obvious...