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Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica

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Health assessment and state drift detection for traveling wave tubes in communication satellites

  

  • Received:2026-06-10 Revised:2026-10-06 Online:2026-10-13 Published:2026-10-13
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China;National Key R&D Program of China

Abstract: The traveling wave tube (TWT) is a key component in the radio frequency power amplification chain of communication satellite payloads, and its on-orbit health state is difficult to fully characterize using a single telemetry variable or fixed engineering thresholds. To address the difficulty in quantitatively detecting and interpreting pre-fault state deviations of TWTs under scarce fault-label conditions, this paper proposes an unsupervised state drift detection method based on healthy normal-pattern learning and the Wasserstein distance of prediction-reconstruction residuals. First, healthy-stage multivariate telemetry data are used to train the Block-Context Segmented Recurrent Network (BSRNet), establishing a prediction-reconstruction baseline for the healthy state of TWTs. Second, a healthy reference distribution is constructed in the prediction-reconstruction residual space, and a one-dimensional state drift index is generated using channel-level Wasserstein distances, robust aggregation, and healthy-reference normalization. Third, channel-level drift contributions and changes in the prediction-residual correlation structure are incorporated to interpret the dominant telemetry channels and variable coupling relationships involved in state deviations. Final-ly, experiments are conducted using full-life-cycle TWT telemetry data, pre-fault telemetry data from A17/A18 dual TWTs, and momentum wheel telemetry data. The experimental results show that the proposed method can characterize long-term TWT state drift trajectories, identify multichannel pre-fault deviations dominated by helix current, bus current, and anode-voltage status in the A17/A18 case, and reflect multivariable pre-fault telemetry deviations in the momentum wheel auxiliary case, demonstrating its effectiveness in health assessment and state drift detection for key satellite components.

Key words: communication satellite, traveling wave tube, health assessment, unsupervised state drift detection, prediction-reconstruction residual, Wasserstein distance

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