Axis 2 – Monitoring and Prediction of Complex Systems:

Spinoff creation and national Thesis Prize for an EIPHI PhD

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is being widely applied in many industrial systems to ensure high reliability, safety and availability over their life cycle, and reduce their maintenance cost of engineering.

By monitoring and predicting the future behaviour of any system, PHM thus aims at counteracting the faulty operation states and, hence, predicting and extending the remaining useful lifetime of the system.

Within EIPHI, important progress steps in PHM have successively demonstrated greatly enhanced performances for a diversity of complex systems. Among these, PHM of Fuel Cell systems, which are promising environment-friendly electrical energy converters, has been the target of Marine Jouin’s PhD thesis, for which she has been awarded a 2017 Thesis Prize of the French Club EEA (Electronics and Automation Engineering). Together with her mentor Rafael Gouriveau, such a highly skilled know-how led them to recently cofound “Kipers Industries”; a spinoff dedicated to applying customized real-time monitoring and advanced PHM algorithms to anticipate various equipment or system failures. The aim is to greatly help companies in their preventive maintenance strategies and their decision making process.