Aircraft auxiliary power unit performance assessment and remaining useful life evaluation for predictive maintenance

Abstract

Modern commercial aircraft are usually configured with aircraft condition monitoring system to collect the operating data of subsystems and components, which can be used for airborne system health monitoring and predictive maintenance. This paper presents a baseline model based aircraft auxiliary power unit performance assessment and remaining useful life prediction method using aircraft condition monitoring system reports data, which can facilitate a cost-effective management of auxiliary power units of aircraft fleet. Firstly, the performance baseline model for auxiliary power unit is established using random forest method. Then a health index characterizing the performance degradation of in-service auxiliary power units is obtained based on the performance baseline model. Finally, the performance degradation trend is predicted using Bayesian dynamic linear model. To improve the prediction accuracy, four performance baseline models are established from the data of auxiliary power units under different operating conditions, among which an optimal model is determined. This data-driven baseline model can be used to quantify the performance degradation of auxiliary power units in service, and can be further used to evaluate the remaining useful life of auxiliary power unit using a Bayesian dynamic model. The developed approach is applied on a real data set from 22 auxiliary power units of a commercial aircraft fleet. The results show that the computed health index can effectively characterize the auxiliary power units performance degradation and the remaining useful life relative prediction errors are less than 4% when auxiliary power unit enters the rapid degradation stage. This would allow operators to accurately assess the performance degradation for the auxiliary power units and further proactively plan future maintenance events based on remaining useful life prediction.