A Testbed for Probabilistic Mission Engine Usage Analysis, Phase 2

Engine component fatigue life prediction is based upon material conditions such as temperature, stress and exposure time, all of which are induced by system and flight cycle usage. With increasing demands on weapon systems to perform a greater variety ofmissions like those envisioned for JSF and UAVs/UCAVs, asset usage and mission tracking are becoming crucial for life assessment. Concurrent pressure for system reliability and readiness further accentuates this requirement, not only from a deterministic,but a probabilistic basis as dictated for overall fleet management. The capability to reduce raw fleet duty cycle data into information usable to both designers and maintenance planners is essential. In Phase I, IAC has developed a system for efficientretrieval, analysis, and graphical visualization of data recorded during the aircraft missions. The system is built on the Matlab platform that provides a unique extendible and open architecture for analysis of mission data. In Phase II the software formission data analysis will be further developed to provide a comprehensive extendible framework useful not only for F18 aircrafts but also for other fixed wings as well as other aircrafts of interest to the Navy. This project has a variety of benefits. Itwill provide not only a unified framework for the analysis of vast amount of data that is currently collected during flight of military aircrafts, but also provide a means for more accurate estimation of remaining useful life of engine components andsubsystems on the basis of real mission data. This will result in reduced maintenance costs and down time of aircraft. IAC is under contract with the US Army and Air Force to develop condition based monitoring technologies for turbine engines and aircraftand our proposed technology can be directly applied to this work