Reliability Analysis of Critical Systems in A Fuel Booster Pump Using Advanced Simulation Techniques.

Ying Luo,Zhihai Yang,Tian Hu,Yuanyuan Dong,Yuguang Li,Yubei Guo,Cheng Qian,Hao Zheng

doi:10.3390/ma15061989

Abstract

The fuel booster pump is one of the most vulnerable physical assets in an operating engine due to the harsh environmental and operational conditions. However, because of its high structural complexity and extreme operational conditions, the reliability design of the fuel booster pump becomes especially difficult, particularly by means of experiments. Thus, to overcome such a problem, advanced simulation techniques have become adequate solutions for the reliability assessment and analysis of a fuel booster pump at the design stage. In this paper, by considering the effects of the uncertainties of multiple design parameters, fatigue life distributions of the four key components (which are the sealing bolt, spline shaft, graphite ring, and inducer, respectively) in a fuel booster pump were first predicted by PoF-based reliability simulations. Then, through further sensitivity analysis on each key component, the design parameters most sensitive to the component mean fatigue life were detected from a total of 25 candidate parameters. These parameters include the “nominal diameter” and “preload” for the sealing bolt, “major and minor diameters of the small spline” for the spline shaft, “inside diameter” for the graphite ring, and “fuel pressure on the blade front surface” for the inducer, respectively. These sensitivity results were found to be in good agreement with the results from the qualitative cause analysis on each key component.

Highlights

The fuel boost pump undertakes a significant function to provide a continuous and stable fuel supply under any circumstances, and is subjected to harsh environments such as high temperature, high pressure, high speed, large flow, and strong vibration, which is prone to the great possibility of failure [1]
Current reliability studies on the fuel booster pump have mostly focused on the failure detection, modeling, and mitigation of its key components including the sealing bolt, spline shaft, graphite ring, inducer, etc
For the graphite ring and spline shaft, the normal loads on the contact surface were calculated from the corresponding stochastic finite element simulations and imported into the Archard model and fretting wear model for the prediction of life distribution by wear

Summary

Introduction

The fuel boost pump undertakes a significant function to provide a continuous and stable fuel supply under any circumstances, and is subjected to harsh environments such as high temperature, high pressure, high speed, large flow, and strong vibration, which is prone to the great possibility of failure [1]. Current reliability studies on the fuel booster pump have mostly focused on the failure detection, modeling, and mitigation of its key components including the sealing bolt, spline shaft, graphite ring, inducer, etc. The main failures of the spline shaft are fretting wear load and fatigue failure [2–4]. Cura F et al studied the wear damage of spline coupling and found that graphene is helpful in reducing the friction coefficient and improving the wear reliability [5] whereas for the sealing bolts, the common failure modes lead to fatigue fracture, creep failure, wear-out, and bolt looseness failure [6–8]. Yu Q et al studied the low cycle fatigue life of pre-tightened bolts at high temperature and proposed a new low cycle fatigue model based on the von Mises equivalent stress–strain criterion [9].

Methods

Results

Conclusion