Physics-informed distribution of relaxation times estimation and latent-space condition monitoring of solid oxide fuel and electrolysis cells from electrochemical impedance spectroscopy

Estimating the distribution of relaxation times (DRT) fromelectrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is an ill-posed inverse problem that is highly sensitive to regularisation choices. We propose a physics-informed convolutional autoencoder that estimates DRT directly from EIS data without spectrum-specific tuning. A discretised relation between impedance and the DRT is embedded in the training process, constraining the network to produce impedance-consistent distributions. The model resolves overlapping relaxation processes in synthetic two-ZARC spectra and accurately reconstructs measurements from three independent solid oxide fuel and electrolysis cell datasets, with range-normalised errors below 1.1%. Decoder-probe analysis shows that the learned latent representation is organised according to relaxation timescale. Distances in this latent space capture operating changes, hydrogen-shortage events, and long-term degradation. The same lightweight architecture is applied across all datasets without modification, providing consistent DRT estimation and an interpretable basis for condition monitoring.

Physics-Informed Condition Monitoring of SiC Power Modules

Silicon carbide (SiC) power modules are increasingly deployed in automotive traction inverters, where condition monitoring is essential to prevent in-service failures. Despite extensive qualification under AQG 324, no consolidated approach exists for in-field health state estimation: physics-of-failure lifetime models lack real-time applicability, purely data-driven architectures require large labeled datasets and generalize poorly, and physics-informed frameworks remain too demanding for embedded deployment. We address SiC MOSFET modules assembled with sintered packaging, which suppresses solder degradation and produces aging behavior distinct from previously studied devices. Instead of the smooth quasi-exponential drift of solder-based modules, the forward voltage drop $V_{DS}$ exhibits multi-regime profiles, with wirebond liftoff events introducing abrupt, non-monotonic perturbations. We propose a condition monitoring framework combining three elements. First, physics-informed features replace raw sensor signals with cumulative damage indicators derived from junction temperature swing, mean junction temperature and a Miner rule accumulator, encoding degradation history in an interpretable form. Second, a monotonicity constraint enforced by gradient penalty regularization embeds the expected degradation direction as a physics-guided prior. Third, a heavy-tailed output distribution replaces the point estimate, giving calibrated uncertainty robust to the out-of-distribution variance introduced by liftoff. On an industrial power cycling dataset from Infineon Technologies, several neural architectures are compared under a strict cross-validation protocol. The full configuration reduces mean absolute error by approximately 70% over purely data-driven baselines and stays stable across all folds, while remaining lightweight enough for embedded deployment.

DART: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Comprehensive Rope Condition Monitoring

The condition monitoring (CM) of synthetic fibre ropes (SFRs) used in offshore, maritime, and industrial settings demands more than a classifier: inspectors need continuous severity estimates, maintenance recommendations, anomaly flags, deterioration timelines, and automated reports, all from a single inspection image. We present DART (Damage Assessment via Rope Transformer), a vision-language foundation model that addresses the full rope inspection workflow through a unified multi-task architecture. DART extends the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to the cross-modal domain by coupling a Vision Transformer (ViT-H/14) with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct via a Severity-Conditioned Cross-Modal Fusion (SC-CMF) module. Three architectural innovations drive the model's versatility: (1) HD-MASK, a saliency-guided masking strategy that focuses self-supervised reconstruction on damage-dense patches; (2) per-class learnable severity gates that adaptively weight language grounding by damage category; and (3) a Contrastive Damage Disentanglement (CDD) loss that shapes the embedding space to simultaneously encode damage type, severity ordering, and cross-modal semantics. Trained once on 4,270 images spanning 14 fine-grained rope damage classes, the frozen DART backbone supports downstream tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning: damage classification (93.22 % accuracy, 91.04 % macro-F1, +38.5 pp over a vision-only baseline), continuous severity regression (Spearman rho = 0.94, within-1-ordinal accuracy 99.6 %), few-shot recognition (89.2 % macro-F1 at 20 shots). These results demonstrate that DART functions as a general-purpose CM backbone that goes well beyond classification, providing actionable inspection intelligence from a single shared representation.