Microsecond Intermittent Fault Detection for Wire and Connector Defect Prognostics

Wire fault detection has been identified as a crucial need for aircraft safety. Several accidents were reportedly caused by intermittent faults such as arcs, encouraging studies on their detection. Detecting intermittent defects is only possible if the detection device is embedded within or close to the harness and it requires a very fast and efficient method, robust to noise. The recently presented Chaos Time Domain Reflectometry (CTDR) method has shown high robustness to noise and the capacity of monitoring power as well as communication wires without interfering with existing signals. This paper shows that CTDR can detect short intermittent faults in wires, shorter than one microsecond, paving the way to the early detection of incipient defects long before they impact the quality of service of the system, for wire and connector defect prognostics.