Condition-Based Maintenance for Aircraft Engines

Abstract

In this paper we describe how a condition-based maintenance (CBM) system might be operated for operators of assets such as aircraft engines. We show that merely having a monitoring and diagnostics system in place is not enough to derive the full, or even the majority of the, benefit from CBM. Our investigations show that to maximize the benefits from CBM for the enterprise, it is as important to focus on the aftermarket supply chain — i.e. the back-end of the process — as it is to develop better data gathering, diagnostics, and prognostics techniques. Via simulation, we show that optimizing the value chain results in lower costs and turn around times, and higher asset availability, spare part availability, and fill rates. For individual equipment operators the benefits could be substantial, depending on the size of their fleets and nature of their equipment usage. Providers of maintenance services, increasingly the original equipment manufacturers, stand to gain as well. As the demands on the aftermarket supply chain become more predictable, they can service the same asset base with lower spares inventory, while meeting increasingly aggressive turn-around-time targets, thus improving the bottom line and customer satisfaction.

Advanced diagnostics and prognostics for engine health monitoring

“…Engine health can be evaluated using different approaches [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Inspection of engine health over a period of time which includes several flight cycles gives an insight into engine health deterioration.…”

On-Line Transient Engine Diagnostics in a Kalman Filtering Framework

“…The estimation procedure is described in figure 3. The update procedure is similar to the one depicted in figure 2 except that, conversely to the health parameters, the dynamic behaviour of the state variables is driven by equation (1).…”

“…The steadily rising importance of performance monitoring in the maintenance process of a modern turbine engine for aircraft propulsion has been promoted, these last years, by the advent of condition-based maintenance [1] for which the maintenance schedule is continuously updated based on the recording and the analysis of turbine engine performances over a long period of time. Basically, such a trend analysis is intended to provide a means of detecting significant changes in the performance parameters which result from changes in the mechanical conditions of the engine.…”

Heat Transfer and Pressure Loss Measurements of Matrix Cooling Geometries for Gas Turbine Airfoils

“…A detailed investigation on HTCs and pressure losses in lattice-matrix channels was carried out by Bunker [5] over a range of Reynolds number from 20,000 to 100,000. Two different methods were applied to determine the local and overall HTCs for ribs with an inclination angle of 45 deg.…”