With the high performance demands of turbine engines, particularly during aircraft take-off and landing, the necessity of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance makes designing these engines for maintainability extremely important. Maintenance issues, however, are normally not addressed in the preliminary stages of design. Thus, we are interested in determining top level engine design specifications which include maintainability issues. For this study we use the High Speed Civil Transport aircraft engine cycle as our example. We identify critical maintenance actions and levels for the HSCT and map these maintenance issues into the conceptual design phase. To facilitate a thorough concept exploration process for top level design specifications including maintainability issues, we implement the Robust Concept Exploration Method (RCEM). Our focus in this paper is to demonstrate a method of abstracting maintainability issues to the preliminary stages of design, rather than the results per se.
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