Topical Issues in Aircraft Health Management with Applications to Jet Engines

Abstract

Aircraft Health Management Technology for jet engines represents a very important problem, since it develops a large impact on reducing the engine life cycle costs, improving the fuel efficiency, increasing the engines durability and life cycle. This technology is high-end and, in order to enable an improved level of performance that far exceeds the current one, propulsion systems must comply with terms of reducing harmful emissions, maximizing fuel efficiency and minimizing noise, while improving system’s affordability and safety. Aircraft Health Management Technology includes multiple goals of aircraft propulsion control, diagnostics problems, prognostics realized, and their proper integration in control systems. Modern control for Aircraft Health Management Technology is based on improved control techniques and therefore provides improved aircraft propulsion system performances. The study presented in this paper approaches a new concept, of attractive interest currently, that is the intelligent control; in this context, the Health Management of jet engines is crucial, being focused on engine controllers which are designed to match certain operability and performance constraints. Automated Engine Health Management has the capacity to significantly reduce the maintenance effort and propulsion systems’ logistical footprint. In order to prioritize and resolve problems in the field of support engineering there are required more detailed data on equipment reliability and failures detection and management; the equipment design, operations and maintenance procedures and tooling are also very important.

Research on selection method of aero-engine health parameters based on correlation and condition number

“…where the state variable x ¼ ½N 1 N 2 is the LPT shaft speed and the number of revolutions of the HPT, the control variable u ¼ ½W fb A 8 is the fuel flow rate and the throat area of nozzle, and the output variable y ¼ ½N 1 N 2 P 3 T 5 is the low and high-pressure rotor speed, the pressure of HPC outlet, and the temperature of LPT outlet. By expanding equation (1) with Taylor series and ignoring the higher-order components, the engine state variable model near the steady-state point can be obtained…”

“…Performance of an engine will inevitably deteriorate under long-term and harsh working condition. Due to the corrosion of compressor blades and turbine blades, combustion chamber flame tube ablation, engine shell deformation and other factors, performance of the engine will change slowly with the increase of flight sorties, 1 and its flow capacity and operating efficiency will also change, resulting in deviation from the rated working state and failure. Among them, the failure caused by gas path degradation accounts for more than 90% of the total engine failure.…”