ALBERT

Description: The Nickel Cadmium Battery Expert System-2 (NICBES2) is a prototype diagnostic expert system for Nickel Cadmium Battery Health Management. NICBES2 is intended to support evaluation of the performance of Hubble Space Telescope spacecraft batteries, and to alert personnel to possible malfunctions. To achieve this, NICBES2 provides a reasoning system supported by appropriate battery domain knowledge. NICBES2 oversees the status of the batteries by evaluating data gathered in orbit packets, and when the status so merits, raises an alarm and provides fault diagnosis as well as advice on the actions to be taken to remedy the particular alarm. In addition to diagnosis and advice, it provides status history of the batteries' health, and a graphical display capability to help in assimilation of the information by the operator. NICBES2 is composed of three cooperating processes driven by a program written in SunOS C. A serial port process gathers incoming data from an RS-232 connection and places it into a raw data pipe. The data handler processes read this information from the raw data pipe and perform statistical data reduction to generate a set of reduced data files per orbit. The expert system process starts the Quintus Prolog interpreter and the expert system and then uses the reduced data files for the generation of status and advice information. The expert system presents the user with an interface window composed of six subwindows: Battery Status, Advice Selection, Support, Battery Selection, Graphics, and Actions. The Battery status subwindow can provide a display of the current status of a battery. Similarly, advice on battery reconditioning, charging, and workload can be obtained from the Advice Selection subwindow. A display of trends for the last orbit and over a sequence of the last twelve orbits is available in the Graph subwindow. A WHY button is available to give the user an explanation of the rules that the expert system used in determining the current information. The Support subwindow contains an editor for altering the knowledge base. NICBES2 is written in C-language and Quintus Prolog for Sun series computers running SunOS. It requires 8Mb of RAM for execution. The Quintus ProWindows graphics system is required for graphical display, and a Postscript printer is required to print graphics. A DEC LSI-11 is required to send telemetry via a RS-232 connection. The program is available on a .25 inch streaming magnetic tape cartridge in UNIX tar format. NICBES2 was developed in 1989. Sun and SunOS are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories. DEC LSI-11 is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation.

Description: This report gives the results of an electrical power system fault study which has been conducted over the last 2 and one-half years. First, the results of the literature search into electrical power system faults in space and terrestrial power system applications are reported. A description of the intended implementations of the power system faults into the Large Autonomous Spacecraft Electrical Power System (LASEPS) breadboard is then presented. Then, the actual implementation of the faults into the breadboard is discussed along with a discussion describing the LASEPS breadboard. Finally, the results of the injected faults and breadboard failures are discussed.