Application of ROMs to Aeroengines Health Monitoring

摘要

Reduced Order Models (ROMs) have recently found great application within the field of aerothermodynamics, for the study of highly complex physical systems, such as the analysis of aeroelastic effects in transonic flight of modern jet fighters, heat transfer effects in separated flows, etc. Given the great computational time reduction that can be achieved by means of implementing this sort of methodologies, the aim of this paper is to assess whether ROMs could find similar usage within the engine health management system of modern turbofans. For this purpose, an engine model is created in PROOSIS, with the ability to simulate degraded performance of the aeroengine. The model is coupled with an optimisation algorithm developed in MATLAB to solve the inverse problem, in which the actual state of degradation of the individual components of the engine are worked out from the data gathered by the engine sensors. The capabilities of ROMs to speed up the above calculations are explored, with the final idea in mind of facilitating the development of a health management tool that can be deployed on-board, running in real-time and constantly assessing the engine degradation state, both to improve decision-making process of maintenance actions to be taken, as well as for on-the-fly update of the control system of the aeroengine based on its actual degradation state at every point during the mission. The impact that such a tool could have in both the direct and indirect operating costs of aeroengines is expected to be very relevant, especially for civil commercial aviation.