Acoustic Diagnostics of Turbofan Health Monitoring

coustic Diagnostics of Turbofan Health

Monitoring

This unique innovation employs an array of external microphones to pinpoint faults within turbofan engines. The development team partnered with Armstrong's Vehicle Integrated Propulsion Research (VIPR)

effort by piggybacking onto an existing field test. After a successful demonstration, the project is now part of the VIPR program, which will fund the work going forward.

Work to date: The team has achieved several significant technical accomplishments, most notably the successful recording of VIPR turbofan engine data with external microphones. In this particular test, bleed valve failures were induced at both high- and low-pressure compressor stages within an engine and the data were recorded. The team then developed software algorithms to identify engine faults

within acoustic data and applied these algorithms to the recorded data, successfully identifying the bleed valve failures in the high-pressure stage.

Looking ahead: Identifying faults at low-pressure stages will require a system with greater sensitivity; therefore, the team plans to use additional experimental recorded data to show how an array of microphones can detect quieter faults.

Benefits

 Accurate: Uses an innovative array configuration to pinpoint the exact location of a fault within an engine

 Efficient: Optimizes condition-based maintenance so that service occurs only when needed rather than at predetermined times

 Improves safety: Identifies faults before they cause catastrophic damage

Applications

 Aircraft engines, commercial rail, and trucks  Military land transport vehicles

Flight and Ground Experimental Test Technologies

Armstrong conducts innovative flight research that continues to expand its world-class capabilities, with special expertise in research and testbed platforms, science platforms, and support aircraft. Re-searchers place particular emphasis on providing accurate flight data for research aimed at designing next-generation flight vehicles. Described here are research projects that are seeking to increase safety, reduce costs, and dramatically decrease testing and approval times. Armstrong's new verification and validation (V&V) simulation test bench is particularly innovative as it integrates reconfigurable software models for multiple aircraft components. These models enable high-fidelity simulations to be performed more easily and at significantly faster rates than are possible with hardware-centric test benches.