Development of a Full Scale Experimental and Simulation Tool for Environmental Control System Optimisation and Fault Detection

Childs, Thomas G.; Jones, Andy; Chen, Rui; Murray, Angus

doi:10.2514/6.2015-1196

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Data collected were used to calculate the overall efficiency of the WS for design validation. 88 Childs et al 89 developed a rig for testing BAE Systems fast-jet Hawk military aircraft ECS at Loughborough University. The two-wheel bootstrap cycle with LPWS ECS was set up in a lab environment.…”

Section: Experimental Work On the Ecs Diagnosticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A review of aircraft environmental control system simulation and diagnostics

Chowdhury

Ali

Jennions

2023

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G:

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The aircraft Environmental Control System (ECS) enables the aircraft to maintain a comfortable and safe environment for its passengers throughout its operating envelope. The Pressurised Air Conditioner (PACK) is the heart of the ECS, and is composed of multiple sub-systems: heat exchangers, valves, compressor, turbine, and a water separator. The PACK’s principle function is to enable conditioning of the hot, high pressure bleed air from the engine or APU, for temperature, pressure and humidity against the cabin requirements. The operation of the PACK is governed by a control system which has the ability to mask degradation in its component during operation until severe degradation or failure results. The required maintenance is then both costly and disruptive. The PACK has been reported as major driver of unscheduled maintenance by the operators. The aviation industry is currently proactively exploring innovative health management solutions that aid the maintenance of aircraft key systems based on predictive based maintenance approaches using online condition monitoring techniques. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the simulation and diagnostic methodologies applicable to fault diagnostics of the ECS PACK. The existing literature suggests that model-based and data-driven methods are effective for conducting fault detection and isolation of the PACK system. The conceived findings indicate that the model-based diagnostic approach have been extensively employed to conduct PACK diagnostics at component level only. Their successful implementation requires robust experimental verification and validation against the actual data under healthy and faulty conditions. Although a substantial amount of work has been reported on developing first principles based simulation models and diagnostic strategies for the ECS, the acquired findings suggest that there is a compelling need for a verified and validated ECS simulation model to enable accurate PACK system-level diagnostics based on single and multiple component level degradation scenarios. It has also been identified that the existing literature lacks the evaluation of humidity regulation and the effect of the control system on the PACK performance characteristics. Finally, a taxonomy of diagnostic techniques and simulation models is compiled based on the available literature.

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Section: Experimental Work On the Ecs Diagnosticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Childs et al 89 developed a rig for testing BAE Systems fast-jet Hawk military aircraft ECS at Loughborough University. The two-wheel bootstrap cycle with LPWS ECS was set up in a lab environment.…”

Section: Experimental Work On the Ecs Diagnosticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of aircraft environmental control system simulation and diagnostics

Chowdhury

Ali

Jennions

2023

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G:

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“…The C i for a voltage bus is selected to be at least one order of magnitude smaller than the generator due to the fact that bus transients are significantly faster than generator transients. The general expression for the voltage time rate of change within electrical system components is defined as (26) where each P denotes the amount of power flowing in or out of a component. Sections 4.1-4.2 detail the selection of C i and form of Eq.…”

Section: Electrical Graph Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Ref. [26], a two-wheel bootstrap ACM from an unidentified BAE Systems (Farnborough, UK) aircraft was tested for a limited set of flight conditions in order to validate a one-dimensional thermodynamic model, which was used to extrapolate ACM performance over an entire flight envelope. The data that are used to validate the steady-state behavior of the graph model come from Ref.…”

Section: Empirical Validation Of Graphmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical Graph Models of Aircraft Electrical, Thermal, and Turbomachinery Components

Williams

Koeln

Pangborn

et al. 2017

Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control

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The current trend of electrification in modern aircraft has driven a need to design and control onboard power systems that are capable of meeting strict performance requirements while maximizing overall system efficiency. Model-based control provides the opportunity to meet the increased demands on system performance, but the development of a suitable model can be a difficult and time-consuming task. Due to the strong coupling between systems, control-oriented models should capture the underlying physical behavior regardless of energy domain or time-scale. This paper seeks to simplify the process of identifying a suitable control-oriented model by defining a scalable and broadly applicable approach to generating graph-based models of thermal, electrical, and turbomachinery aircraft components and systems. Subsequently, the process of assembling component graphs into a dynamical system graph that integrates multiple energy domains is shown. A sample electrical and thermal management system is used to demonstrate the capability of a graph model at matching the complex dynamics exhibited by nonlinear and empirically based simulation models.

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“…To attain reliability on the model's capability to accurately estimate PACK performance under healthy and degraded scenarios, a systematic verification and validation is necessary. As reported by Childs et al, an experimental rig was developed using a Hawk ECS to perform ECS model verification [18]. Similarly, an experimental investigation was conducted on a Boeing 737-200 aircraft to collect temperature, pressure and valve position to support verification of an ECS thermodynamic model [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Novel Ground Test Facility for Aircraft Environmental Control System

Chowdhury

Ali

Jennions

2023

Journal of Thermal Science and Engineering Applications

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In this paper the experimental investigation of a Boeing 737 aircraft Environmental Control System (ECS) passenger air conditioner (PACK) has been reported. The PACK is the heart of the ECS that conditions bleed air prior to supplying it to the cabin and avionics bay. Its capability to mask fault occurrences has resulted in increased unscheduled maintenance of the system. As such it has been a key research topic to understand PACK performance characteristics in order to support an accurate diagnostic solution. This paper is a continuation of the authors' work on the development of a systematically derived PACK simulation model and reports the overall development and qualification of a novel in-situ ground test facility (GTF) for the experimental investigation of a B737-400 aircraft PACK under various operating modes, including the effect of trim air system. The developed GTF enables the acquisition of the temperature, pressure and mass flow data throughout the PACK. The overall process of instrumentation selection, installation, sensor uncertainty, and testing in terms of data repeatability and consistency has been reported. The acquired data is then employed to conduct a V&V of the SESAC simulation framework. The reported research work therefore enables the advancement in the level of scientific understanding corresponding to the ECS PACK operation under real operating conditions, and therefore supports the development of a robust simulation framework.

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Development of a Full Scale Experimental and Simulation Tool for Environmental Control System Optimisation and Fault Detection

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

A review of aircraft environmental control system simulation and diagnostics

A review of aircraft environmental control system simulation and diagnostics

Dynamical Graph Models of Aircraft Electrical, Thermal, and Turbomachinery Components

Development of a Novel Ground Test Facility for Aircraft Environmental Control System

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