US Patent 8682612 Trend analysis methods and system for incipient fault prediction

There is described herein the extension of the application of the Laplace Test Statistic for trend analysis and prediction of incipient faults for power systems. The extensions consider the situation where two parameters believed to contribute explicitly to the eventual failure are monitored. The developed extensions applied to actual incipient failure events provide promising results for prediction of the impending failure. It is demonstrated that by incorporating two parameters in the trend analysis, the robustness to outliers is increased and the flexibility is augmented by increasing the degrees of freedom in the generation of the alarm signal.