A Comprehensive On-board Generator Health Management System

Generators play a key role in a wide range of military and commercial applications. Especially for aerospace applications, increased power generation with reduced size and weight is a continuous design objective that taxes life limiting components such as bearings, windings, diode assembles, and rectifiers in already harsh operating environments. Both time and money are lost as generator failures can lead to mission aborts and expensive, time-consuming maintenance procedures that affect overall fleet performance. To address this need, new technologies are required that permit continuous real-time monitoring of these generators to provide long-range forecasting of problems, preserve valuable hardware, improve safety of flight, extend time between maintenance, and increase vehicle autonomy. Luna Innovations proposes to develop an on-board generator health-management system that integrates data from fiber-optic sensors and supplemental data with a prognostic software architecture. This system will consist of two primary elements: a fiber-optic sensing system developed to measure critical indicators of failure in generators and health management software to fuse sensory information into a complete prognostic architecture that will ensure early damage detection, thereby learning of a problem when it is least costly to repair and before it becomes a threat to either crew safety or mission success.