Integrated Engine Health Management System

The United States Air Force is currently investigating system concepts with global reach within an hour or two. It is also examining system concepts that have the ability to rapidly and with very high reliability deploy critical assets into space. Approaches under consideration for both of these applications include reusable, highly operable and responsive rocket based vehicles. To achieve the capabilities required of these vehicles, requires rocket engines achieve the reliability and operability goals set out by IHPRPT. Rocket engine concepts that have been developed to achieve these goals have identified an integrated engine health management system (IEHMS) as one of the most critical technology needs in the engine system. This effort will demonstrate that an engine management system can effectively employ a transient engine simulation to provide rocket engine condition monitoring and real time anomaly detection. Phase 1 of the effort will demonstrate the viability of our approach. Phase 2, if funded, will implement our approach and apply it to monitoring, not controlling, an engine, such as the IPD, during hot fire testing.