A Testbed for Probabilistic Mission Engine Usage Analysis

"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 weapon systems being called on 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.Proposed here is the development of a testbed to perform probabilistic analysis of mission / engine duty cycle data to aid in diagnostics, prognostics and condition based maintenance of gas turbine engines. The testbed will include data collection,analysis, visualization, signal processing and probabilistic analysis and system development tools for engine usage cycle analysis for component and system life modeling. Pratt & Whitney, world leaders in the design and production of gas turbine engines,will support IAC in all phases of the SBIR by supplying expertise and real engine data The potential commercial applications for the technology, techniques, and systems to ultimately come out of this SBIR are significant. Pratt & Whitney, a partner on P