PCA and ICA Based Prognostic Health Monitoring of Electronic Assemblies Subjected to Simultaneous Temperature-Vibration Loads

This paper focusses on health monitoring of electronic assemblies under vibration load of 14 G until failure at an ambient temperature of 55 degree Celsius. Strain measurements of the electronic assemblies were measured using the voltage outputs from the strain gauges which are fixed at different locations on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB). Various analysis was conducted on the strain signals include Time-frequency analysis (TFA), Joint Time-Frequency analysis (JTFA) and Statistical techniques like Principal component analysis (PCA), Independent component analysis (ICA) to monitor the health of the packages during the experiment. Frequency analysis techniques were used to get a detailed understanding of the different frequency components before and after the failure of the electronic assemblies. Different filtering algorithms and frequency quantization techniques gave insight about the change in the frequency components with the time of vibration and the energy content of the strain signals was also studied using the joint time-frequency analysis. It is seen that as the vibration time increases the occurrence of new high-frequency components increases and further the amplitude of the high-frequency components also has increased compared to the before failure condition. Statistical techniques such as PCA and ICA were primarily used to reduce the dimensions of the larger data sets and provide a pattern without losing the different characteristics of the strain signals during the course of vibration of electronic assemblies till failure. This helps to represent the complete behavior of the electronic assemblies and to understand the change in the behavior of the strain components till failure. The principal components which were calculated using PCA discretely separated the before failure and after failure strain components and this behavior were also seen by the independent components which were calculated using the Independent Component Analysis (ICA). To quantify the prognostics and hence the health of the electronic assemblies, different statistical prediction algorithms were applied to the coefficients of principal and independent components calculated from PCA and ICA analysis. The instantaneous frequency of the strain signals was calculated and PCA and ICA analysis on the instantaneous frequency matrix was done. The variance of the principal components of instantaneous frequency showed an increasing trend during the initial hours of vibration and after attaining a maximum value it then has a decreasing trend till before failure. During the failure of components, the variance of the principal component decreased further and attained a lowest value. This behavior of the instantaneous frequency over the period of vibration is used as a health monitoring feature.