Large-scale vibration monitoring of aircraft engines from operational data using self-organized models

Abstract

Vibration analysis is an important component of industrial equipment health monitoring. Aircraft engines in particular are complex rotating machines where vibrations, mainly caused by unbalance, misalignment, or damaged bearings, put engine parts under dynamic structural stress. Thus, monitoring the vibratory behavior of engines is essential to detect anomalies and trends, avoid faults and improve availability. Intrinsic properties of parts can be described by the evolution of vibration as a function of rotation speed, called a vibration signature. This work presents a methodology for large-scale vibration monitoring of operating civil aircraft engines, based on unsupervised learning algorithms and a flight recorder database. Firstly, we present a pipeline for massive extraction of vibration signatures from raw flight data, consisting in time-domain medium-frequency sensor measurements. Then, signatures are classified and visualized using interpretable self-organized clustering algorithms, yielding a visual cartography of vibration profiles. Domain experts can then extract various insights from the resulting models. An abnormal temporal evolution of a signature gives early warning before failure of an engine. In a post-finding situation after an event has occurred, similar at-risk engines are detectable. The approach is global, end-to-end and scalable, which is yet uncommon in our industry, and has been tested on real flight data.