Real-time estimation of equipment lifespan

Real-time estimation of residual service life

At Metravib Engineering, we develop cutting-edge approaches for monitoring the health of structures exposed to severe mechanical environments. Our recent work focuses on the ability to estimate in real-time the residual lifetime of equipment subjected to vibration and dynamic loads, opening up new perspectives for predictive maintenance and operational reliability.

A major challenge for sectors exposed to dynamic stress

Mechanical fatigue remains one of the main causes of failure in service, particularly in the mobility, defense and energy sectors. Complex vibratory stresses, often non-stationary and punctuated by extreme events, make it difficult to accurately predict component service life.

Faced with these challenges, our approach aims to go beyond traditional laboratory testing methods, as well as the limitations inherent in one-off or periodic monitoring, which can ignore extreme or significant events, by integrating embedded systems directly in the field capable of tracking the evolution of equipment health in real operation.

Real-time monitoring and service life estimation

Our recent work has enabled us to develop an on-board methodology capable of continuously measuring and analyzing vibration signals to extract two key indicators:

The Extreme Response Spectrum (ERS), to assess shock severity,
The Fatigue Damage Spectrum (FDS), to quantify vibration-related wear.

These indicators can be used to :

Validate the mechanical strength of structures throughout their life cycle,
Identify the actual conditions of use of the equipment,
Estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) as a function of measured stresses.

Monitoring adapted to real-life mission profiles

Our approach adapts to different operational contexts. By identifying the dominant operating regimes and extrapolating the damage measured, we provide an anticipated vision of the evolution of mechanical degradation. This approach not only enables maintenance operations to be triggered at the right time, but also optimizes equipment design and qualification, by providing precise data on actual stresses, enabling components to be sized more accurately, validation tests to be targeted, and costly over-designs or risks of undersizing to be avoided.

An approach based on field observation

The results obtained from real-life test campaigns demonstrate the ability of our approach to precisely monitor the evolution of mechanical damage, with sufficient accuracy to support strategic decisions in operation or design. We are continuing our work in even more demanding environments in order to broaden the scope of application of this technology.

Conclusion and outlook

We believe that this approach represents a major advance in the field of in-service structural monitoring.

In this exploratory phase, we are looking to collaborate with industrial partners wishing to test these capabilities on their own use cases. If you are a player in a sector concerned by dynamic demands (mobility, energy, defense, etc.) and would like to contribute to the evolution of these solutions, we would be delighted to hear from you.

We invite pioneering users to join us in building the next steps for this technology. Your feedback is essential to refine the uses, interfaces and integration potential in complex environments.

Discover our White Paper for engineers & managers engineering, maintenance and reliability!

Let's work together to develop the solution that's right for you.