Life and Reliability Prediction for Turbopropulsion Systems to Manage Maintenance Costs

For un-fielded propulsion systems such as the Versatile Affordable Advanced Turbine Engine (VAATE), a technical approach is needed to predict reliability and maintenance cost. This predictive ability is of value because it will enable the designers to select materials and design configurations that have a higher probability of meeting maintenance cost goals. It would also enable prediction of engine maintenance metrics such as number of failures, mean time between maintenance events, and average time on wing for future systems. American Technology and Services, Inc. (ATS) has been a pioneer in the development of Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis tools for the VAATE Initiative. The proposed research to extrapolate Weibull parameters from material properties and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) would dovetail well with ATS's Maintenance Cost Assessment Program (MCAP), thereby enabling an assessment of maintenance cost for future propulsion systems. High temperature environments, dwell times, and other factors will be examined to assess their impact on reliability. Physics-based stochastic models may be developed to analyze component fatigue. A large engine company is teamed with ATS for this research.