Advanced signal processing tools for helicopters’ future Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS)

Abstract

Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) have been developed in order to monitor the health condition of helicopter drivetrains, focusing towards early, accurate and on time fault detection with limited false alarms and missed detections. Among other systems, the Main GearBox (MGB) is the heart of the drivetrain, reducing the high input speed generated by the engines, in order to provide the appropriate torque to the main rotors and to other auxiliary systems. HUMS are mounted on helicopters aiming to enhance the operational reliability and to support maintenance decision making, in order to increase the flight safety keeping in the meanwhile the overall maintenance cost low. Currently used HUMS seems to have reached their limits and the need for improvement has been recently highlighted by the post-accident analysis of the helicopter LN-OJF, which crashed in Norway in 2016. The aim of this paper is the application and further extension of recently proposed advanced cyclostationary based signal processing tools for the accurate detection of faults in helicopter gearboxes. The methodologies are tested, evaluated and compared with state of the art methods on datasets captured during experimental tests under various operating conditions on helicopter gearboxes, including a Category A Super Puma SA330 main planetary gearbox.