The intake air filter monitor is a diagnostics/prognostics feature that aims to determine the condition of the intake air filter in the internal combustion engine. This feature is required to indicate the need for maintenance whenever the filter is clogged to the point where the engine performance may be impacted. The prognostics of the air filter helps in saving on operational costs, maintaining the optimal fuel economy, and planning for service/maintenance before failure.
In this paper, one diagnostics/prognostics method is reviewed and a generic statistics based process is proposed to convert the percent life remaining of the air filter into time and distance indicators. The estimated indicators are determined based on the vehicle driving statistics together with the degradation rate of the filter. These indicators provide more meaningful real time information to the driver or fleet owner than a percentage of the remaining life. The proposed method was validated based on driving data of a production vehicle obtained from Ford big data drive (BDD), combined with simulated degradation profile of the air filter.
