A turbo engine is used to improve engine volumetric efficiency by using the energy of exhaust gas with a device such as a turbocharger. Recently, it has been attracting attention as a solution for responding to environmental issues such as exhaust gas regulation, and its use is being expanded to gasoline and CNG engines as well as diesel engines. However, as electric and hydrogen vehicles enter the automotive market more rapidly, traditional turbo engines also confront many challenges. In this paper, to examine the current status and prospects of the turbo engine, we analyze the related patents in the turbo engine field applied to patent offices in seven major countries, including Korea, USA, China, Japan, Germany, France, and the European Union Patent Office, and analyze the patent application trend. Using ‘the pie’ system of Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), family patents were refined, patent application trends were diagnosed, and the technology and market competitiveness of major applicants were compared and analyzed. Even within the turbo engine market, where traditional automakers and turbocharger manufacturer participate, it was possible to examine the dynamic changes in the market through the analysis of technology and market competitiveness. The main companies leading the technology and market aspects and the companies specialized in the technology and market aspects were observed.

As mechatronic systems have various, complex functions and require high performance, automatic fault detection is necessary for secure operation in manufacturing processes. For conducting automatic and real-time fault detection in modern mechatronic systems, multiple sensor signals are collected by internet of things technologies. Since traditional statistical control charts or machine learning approaches show significant results with unified and solid density models under normal operating states but they have limitations with scattered signal models under normal states, many pattern extraction and matching approaches have been paid attention. Signal discretization-based pattern extraction methods are one of popular signal analyses, which reduce the size of the given datasets as much as possible as well as highlight significant and inherent signal behaviors. Since general pattern extraction methods are usually conducted with a fixed size of time segmentation, they can easily cut off significant behaviors, and consequently the performance of the extracted fault patterns will be reduced. In this regard, adjustable time segmentation is proposed to extract much meaningful fault patterns in multiple sensor signals. By considering inflection points of signals, we determine the optimal cut-points of time segments in each sensor signal. In addition, to clarify the inflection points, we apply Savitzky-golay filter to the original datasets. To validate and verify the performance of the proposed segmentation, the dataset collected from an aircraft engine (provided by NASA prognostics center) is used to fault pattern extraction. As a result, the proposed adjustable time segmentation shows better performance in fault pattern extraction.

This paper proposes an outlier detection model based on machine learning that can diagnose the presence or absence of major engine parts through unsupervised learning analysis of main engine big data of a ship. Engine big data of the ship was collected for more than seven months, and expert knowledge and correlation analysis were performed to select features that are closely related to the operation of the main engine. For unsupervised learning analysis, ensemble model wherein many predictive models are strategically combined to increase the model performance, is used for anomaly detection. As a result, the proposed model successfully detected the anomalous engine status from the normal status. To validate our approach, clustering analysis was conducted to find out the different patterns of anomalies the anomalous point. By examining distribution of each cluster, we could successfully find the patterns of anomalies.

Recently, a study of prognosis and health management (PHM) was conducted to diagnose failure and predict the life of air craft engine parts using sensor data. PHM is a framework that provides individualized solutions for managing system health. This study predicted the remaining useful life (RUL) of aeroengine using degradation data collected by sensors provided by the IEEE 2008 PHM Conference Challenge. There are 218 engine sensor data that has initial wear and production deviations. It was difficult to determine the characteristics of the engine parts since the system and domain-specific information was not provided. Each engine has a different cycle, making it difficult to use time series models. Therefore, this analysis was performed using machine learning algorithms rather than statistical time series models. The machine learning algorithms used were a random forest, gradient boost tree analysis and XG boost. A sliding window was applied to develop RUL predictions. We compared model performance before and after applying the sliding window, and proposed a data preprocessing method to develop RUL predictions. The model was evaluated by R-square scores and root mean squares error (RMSE). It was shown that the XG boost model of the random split method using the sliding window preprocessing approach has the best predictive performance.