Although HUMS technology has matured during the last decade, to date CBM has not yet been implemented on a large scale. This paper presents the approach of fatigue management of components and the motivation behind individually adapting the service life of a component to the true load spectrum, which is commonly referred to as Usage Based Maintenance (UBM). Since the actual mission profile is generally expected to be far less severe than the worst case profile, there is a potential to reduce operating costs, to increase operational availability and to reduce the maintenance burden. The paper proposes the UBM End-to-End process starting from Usage data acquisition until UBM credit application in terms of service life limit adjustment. New elements in the process and especially all possible sources of uncertainty will be discussed with focus on the prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) and the Regime Recognition (RR) system. Furthermore, the paper presents a novel hybrid RR system built up of three stages, which has been developed and validated on three different rotorcraft types. Finally, the RR system reliability is demonstrated on EC 135 flight load survey data and flight test data based from a flight test campaign performed in 2009.
展开▼
