Abstract
Electro-hydraulic servo-actuators (EHSAs) are currently considered the state-of-the art solution for the control of the primary flight control systems of civil and military aircraft. Combining the expected service life of a commercial aircraft with the fact that electro-hydraulic technology is employed in the vast majority of currently in-service aircraft and is planned to be used on future platforms as well, the development of an effective Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) system could provide significant advantages to fleet operators and aircraft maintenance, such as the reduction of unplanned flight disruptions and increased availability of the aircraft. The occurrence of excessive internal leakage within the EHSAs is one of the most common causes of return from the field of flight control actuators, making this failure mode a priority in the definition of any dedicated PHM routine. This paper presents a case study on the design of a prognostic system for this degradation mode, in the context of a wider effort toward the definition of a prognostic framework suitable to work on in-flight data. The study is performed by means of a high-fidelity simulation model supported by experimental activities. Results of both the simulation and the experimental work are used to select a suitable feature, then implemented within the prognostic framework based on particle filtering. The algorithm is at first theoretically discussed, and then tested against several degradation patterns. Performances are evaluated through state-of-the-art metrics, showing promising results and providing the basis towards future applications on real in-flight data.
Highlights
This paper provides the results of an advancement towards the definition of an operative prognostic tool focused on the detection, identification, and prognosis of the internal leakage of an Electro-hydraulic servo-actuators (EHSAs) employed as a primary flight control actuator in a widebody aircraft currently in service
Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) prognostic framework framework was prepared for the wide-body commercial aircraft was able to successfully detect and EHSAs identifyof thea presence of faults associated withoperating a leakage over long-range routes
PHM system for electro-hydraulic servo actuators employed as primary flight control systems in aircraft, focusing on the detection and prognosis of one of the most common failure modes of these components, the occurrence of internal leakage
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The development of PHM frameworks for primary flight control systems is still a rather unexplored subject, despite representing one of the safety-critical aircraft systems This can be mainly attributed to low availability of relevant data, major difficulties in modeling and testing and generally a lack of sound understanding of the failure mechanisms affecting the most common architectures employing electro-hydraulic servo actuators (EHSAs). An early evaluation of the effects of a few significant degradations for electro-hydraulic servo actuators employed in the stability control augmentation system of an in service helicopter is provided in [11,12] These early studies concurred on the feasibility of a PHM system for EHSAs and addressed the possibility to successfully monitor and identify a few selected failure modes through a purely data-driven approach, while providing early indication on the possibility to prognose such degradations through a particle-filtering framework, but currently lack of experimental confirmation. The PHM framework is described in detail, leading to a discussion on its performances, computational requirements, and applicability constraints
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