Engine Health Management of Mechanical Systems for High Performance Turbine Engines

ABSTRACT: Engine bearing failures are a major safety concern and a significant cost driver for the DoD and Air Force. Most of the costs associated with a bearing failure are associated with secondary engine and aircraft damage after the bearing has reached a critical failure. Oil Debris Monitoring (ODM) has proven to be a reliable and effective indicator of early bearing distress. Vibration monitoring has the potential to provide fault isolation. The combination of these two technologies into a single system capable of providing early detection of bearing distress as well as indication of fault location may prove to be an effective health management approach for advanced turbine engines. The fusion of ODM and vibration data has been demonstrated in laboratory testing but not yet transitioned to actual engines. This SBIR will address this issue and will result in the design and implementation of an Engine Health Management (EHM) system consisting of data processing hardware and sensors which will provide advanced bearing health condition indicators based on the fusion of oil debris and vibration data. The EHM system developed through this SBIR can be directly applied to improving health monitoring of bearings on the F119/F135 and other advanced turbine engines. BENEFIT: The approach of fusing ODM and vibration data and the resulting system developed from this SBIR is directly applicable to improving the state of the art for health monitoring on both military and commercial turbine engines. In addition, since the concern of bearing failures and the associated cost and safety implications are common across other turbine engine applications there is also an opportunity for the technology developed under this SBIR to be applied to other DoD applications such as remotely piloted aircraft, transport and cargo aircraft, ship propulsion, as well as industrial applications such as power generation and process applications.