A review of applications for advanced engine health monitoring in civil aircraft engines

Rolls-Royce has developed TotalCare™, an innovative approach to serving gas turbine operators' needs. A key element of making these services effective is the ability to minimise unplanned equipment downtime, and a major component of this capability is the provision of diagnostic and prognostic tools through advanced health monitoring. The field of condition and health monitoring is developing at a rapid pace. As computing power increases, novel complex signal processing techniques, augmented with state-of-the-Art pattern recognition methods, are now being applied to on-line monitoring systems and operated in real-time. In some cases these new methods are able to extract valuable diagnostic indicators from existing measured signals, and hence avoid costly system upgrades. This paper considers a number of emerging monitoring techniques, with respect to their detection ability in the context of past aviation events, that are likely to be incorporated into future products.© (2006) by the International Institute of Acoustics & Vibration.