Development of GUI Type On-Line Condition Monitoring Program for a Turboprop Engine Using LabVIEW®

Abstract

Recently, the health monitoring system has been developed for precaution and maintenance action against faults or performance degradations of the advanced propulsion system which may be occurred in severe environments such as high altitude, foreign object damage particles, hot and heavy rain and snowy atmospheric conditions. However to establish this health monitoring system, the on-line condition monitoring program is firstly required, and the program must monitor the engine performance trend through comparison between measuring engine performance data and base performance results calculated by base engine performance model. This work aims to develop a GUI type on-line condition monitoring program for the PT6A-67 turboprop engine of a high altitude and long endurance operation UAV using LabVIEW. The base engine performance of the on-line condition monitoring program is simulated using component maps inversely generated from the limited performance deck data provided by engine manufacturer. The base engine performance simulation program is evaluated because analysis results by this program are well agreed with the performance deck data. The proposed on-line condition program can monitor the real engine performance as well as the trend through precise comparison between clean engine performance results calculated by the base performance simulation program and measuring engine performance signals. In the development phase of this monitoring system, a signal generation module is proposed to evaluate the proposed on-line monitoring system. For user friendly purpose, all monitoring program are coded by LabVIEW, and monitoring examples are demonstrated using the proposed GUI type on-condition monitoring program.