Aircraft Electrical Power System Diagnostics and Health Management

The objective of the project is the development of an open architecture, computational toolbox for design and implementation of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms for aircraft electrical power systems. The management of typical failure modes of the electrical system can have substantial returns in the overall availability, safety and operating cost of aircraft. We propose several innovative techniques for monitoring specific components of the power system such as generators, converters, and batteries. The integrated architecture using general purpose symbolic processing, numerical tools and data logging makes this project especially attractive and will bring advances in diagnostics and prognostics to engineering practice. The toolbox will include code generation tools resulting in the ability to seamlessly integrate the designed algorithms by automating several key steps for the implementation phase. In Phase I we have demonstrated the approach using simulations and experimental test beds. The successful completion of this phase of the project provided a prototype health monitoring system and established a framework to integrate new algorithms allowing the rapid packaging of advanced health management techniques for validation and verification, flight certification and final system integration and evaluation. In Phase II, we will develop a diagnostics and prognostics toolbox that will allow the transition of advanced techniques for on-line health monitoring of power system components to operational situations. Outputs from the computational toolbox will be useful for scheduling both routine and preventive maintenance. The developed software and real time implementations will be well suited for packaging and integrating into vehicle health management systems for both military and commercial aircraft.