Development of a Health and Usage Monitoring System (BIG-ROHU)
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) concerns the tasks of predicting the future health of the system and the subsequent optimal maintenance planning informed by the prognostic model. The prognostic process is subject to various sources of uncertainty. Since they are propagated to the health management process, the task of quantifying the prognostic uncertainty is essential for the subsequent maintenance planning, which can thus be classified as a sequential decision problem under uncertainty.
In this project, a Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) is being developed, which provides information on both the health and the actual stress of helicopter components. Herein, rotor components of a medium size helicopter serve as a case study. Experimental certification flights and flight data from operators, together with statistics on maintenance events, provide the data basis for the investigations in this project.
The overall aim of the project is to minimize extraordinary maintenance activities, which ensures sufficient lead time for maintenance planning, increased customer confidence, and improved availability of the fleet/aircraft for the operators. In addition, the project's extended HUMS system is intended to promote increased product life cycle, material and resource efficiency.
To achieve these goals, the research focuses on data- as well as physics-based improvements of the PHM pipeline, which includes the development, application, and validation of innovative methods of:
- Data-driven prognostics and health management
- Physics-based models for the prediction of wear and damage
- Model-order reduction, uncertainty quantification, and sensitivity analysis
