A Maturation Environment to Develop and Manage Health Monitoring Algorithms
Jérôme Lacaille · Annual Conference of the PHM Society · 2009
As the business model for selling jet engines evolves, it becomes useful to propose new systems that help the maintenance support and event monitoring. Automatic diagnosis techniques that are already well applied in other domains, such as manufacturing, chemistry, etc. may be useful in aerospace industry. There is not only a need to conceive new mathematical solutions but also to be able to manage them in time; to improve their efficiency as new data come. Every aircraft manufacturer, engine manufacturer or MRO feel this need today. This document will give a presentation of a solution for the management of HM (Health Monitoring) algorithms. The innovation process is stimulated by long -term research in university labs. The new ideas are converted to applications and codes that need to be installed in a generic framework for test and validation purposes. The maturation environment that we define here manages the ideas from the need definition to the validation of new incoming tools. Hence the development programs are able to know which are the pending innovations, understand their maturity levels and even look at the validation results. The marketing people may also anticipate the evolution of each tool to prepare the market and the business model. 1. THE ENGINE MONITORING ALGORITHM A monitoring algorithm is a complete application that gets information from the engine or a fleet of engines and other sources, transforms data into failure indicators, detects abnormalities or unusual behaviors, and identifies faulty components. Such application is generally built from the combination of elementary steps, which are described in the OSA-CBM (Open Systems Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance) lay out. The input data are acquired from many sources and the results are reused in different applications. Moreover, an algorithm must be validated for many contexts (type of engine, flights-regimes, etc.) and a demonstration is required to validate each application.