Aero engine health monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics for condition-based maintenance: an overview

Aero engine performance deterioration highly influences its reliability, availability and life cycle. Predictive maintenance is therefore a key figure within Industry 4.0, which guarantees high availability and reduced downtime thus reduced operational costs for both military and civil engines. This leads to maintenance on demand and needs an effective engine health monitoring system. This paper overviews the work carried out on aero engine health monitoring, diagnostic and prognostic techniques based on gas path performance parameters. The inception of performance monitoring and its evolution over time, techniques used to establish a high-quality data base using engine model performance adaptation, and effects of computationally intelligent techniques on promoting the implementation of engine fault diagnosis are reviewed. Generating dependable information about the health condition of the engine is therefore a requisite for a successful implementation of condition-based maintenance. Based on this study, further research can be attempted to predict residual life of critical components using degradation pattern from aero engine performance data bank which will be an invaluable asset for engine designers as well as for operators.