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The operation of complex systems can drift away from the initial design conditions, due to environmental conditions, equipment wear or specific restrictions. Steam generators are complex equipment and their proper operation relies on the identification of their most relevant parameters. An approach to rank the operational parameters of a subcritical steam generator of an actual 360 MW power plant is presented. An Artificial Neural Network - ANN delivers a model to estimate the steam generator efficiency, electric power generation and flue gas outlet temperature as a function of seven input parameters. The ANN is trained with a two-year long database, with training errors of 0.2015 and 0.2741 (mean absolute and square error) and validation errors of 0.32% and 2.350 (mean percent and square error). That ANN model is explored by means of a combination of situations proposed by a Design of Experiment - DoE approach. All seven controlled parameters showed to be relevant to express both steam generator efficiency and electric power generation, while primary air flow rate and speed of the dynamic classifier can be neglected to calculate flue gas temperature as they are not statistically significant. DoE also shows the prominence of the primary air pressure in respect to the steam generator efficiency, electric power generation and the coal mass flow rate for the calculation of the flue gas outlet temperature. The ANN and DoE combined methodology shows to be promising to enhance complex system efficiency and helpful whenever a biased behavior must be brought back to stable operation.

Services and warranties of large fleets of engineering assets is a very profitable business. The success of companies in that area is often related to predictive maintenance driven by advanced analytics. Therefore, accurate modeling, as a way to understand how the complex interactions between operating conditions and component capability define useful life, is key for services profitability. Unfortunately, building prognosis models for large fleets is a daunting task as factors such as duty cycle variation, harsh environments, inadequate maintenance, and problems with mass production can lead to large discrepancies between designed and observed useful lives. This paper introduces a novel physics-informed neural network approach to prognosis by extending recurrent neural networks to cumulative damage models. We propose a new recurrent neural network cell designed to merge physics-informed and data-driven layers. With that, engineers and scientists have the chance to use physics-informed layers to model parts that are well understood (e.g., fatigue crack growth) and use data-driven layers to model parts that are poorly characterized (e.g., internal loads). A simple numerical experiment is used to present the main features of the proposed physics-informed recurrent neural network for damage accumulation. The test problem consist of predicting fatigue crack length for a synthetic fleet of airplanes subject to different mission mixes. The model is trained using full observation inputs (far-field loads) and very limited observation of outputs (crack length at inspection for only a portion of the fleet). The results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid physics-informed recurrent neural network is able to accurately model fatigue crack growth even when the observed distribution of crack length does not match with the (unobservable) fleet distribution., Data and codes (including our implementation for both the multi-layer perceptron, the stress intensity and Paris law layers, the cumulative damage cell, as well as python driver scripts) used in this manuscript are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/PML-UCF/pinn. The data and code are released under the MIT License

International audience; The use of surrogates (also known as metamodels) for facilitating optimization and statistical analysis of computationnally expensive simulations has become commonplace. Surrogate models are usually fit to be unbiased (i.e., the error expectation is zero). However, in certain applications, it might be important to safely estimate the response (e.g., in structural analysis, the maximum stress must not be underestimated in order to avoid failure). In this work we use safety margins to conservatively compensate for fitting errors associated with surrogates. We propose the use of cross validation for estimating the required safety margin for a desired level of conservativeness (percentage of safe predictions).The approach was tested on three algebraic examples for two basic surrogates : namely, kriging and polynomial response surface. For these examples we found that cross validaton is effective for selecting the safety margin. We also applied the approach to the probabilistic design optimization of a composite laminate. This design under uncertainty example showed that the approach can be successfully used in engineering applications.

In this study, two different techniques are outlined for assessment of fatigue crack growth life of industrial components: i) a finite element based approach (3DFAS, GE proprietary) using re-meshing techniques that allows automatic propagation of cracks under realistic loading conditions and ii) novel approach using Bayesian hybrid methods (BHM) that significantly improves the efficiency of life assessment computation of the former approach. Parallel processing of a set of three dimensional crack geometries using 3DFAS and Ansys™ is used to create a crack propagation space that is further used to build metamodels required to assess propagation life for an asymmetrically grown planar crack. Verification of the 3DFAS-BHM procedure against automatic (serial mode) finite element crack propagation simulation (using 3DFAS) is provided.