Design and Simulation Validation of an Integrated On-board Aircraft Engine Diagnostic Architecture

Continuing advances in avionics are enabling the migration of portions of the conventional ground-based functionality on-board. The availability of real-time data can monitor the engine performance deterioration on-board, decrease fault detection and isolation latency and increase detection probability of intermittent engine faults. This paper presents a design of an on-board diagnostic architecture for aircraft engine gas path fault detection and isolation, health trend monitoring and parameter estimation. A hardware simulation platform which runs in real time is developed based on xPC Target to evaluate the performance of the structure. Simulation results show that estimation errors by the on-board adaptive model of the structure are below 0. 5% for the engine health,including both measured parameters and unmeasured parameters. The gas path fault diagnostic system can detect and isolate all kinds of gas path faults including intermittent faults earlier with real-time data.