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Health Monitoring Essay

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Introduction

1. Purpose. This report will look into health and usage monitoring for current and future aircraft and the potential benefits that can be gained when utilised to its full capability.

2. Scope. Information in this report details the history and architecture, current usage with advantages and disadvantages, future developments of health monitoring systems within aviation and recommendations for the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

3. Background. The ADF currently has a large variety of aircraft with some of the newest types utilising some form of health monitoring system. The ADF has previously looked into retrofitting some of the older airframes with some form of health monitoring system; however still operate several …show more content…

7. That first conference focused mainly on the challenges, benefits, and latest technologies being developed for rotary and fixed wing aircraft monitoring systems. The main emphasis then turned to retrofitting HUMS to currently operating airframes.

8. In 2000, the ADF explored the concept of retrofitting its fleet of F-111 aircraft with a basic engine monitoring system. At the time, this would have been a state of the art modification for the analog-era platform. The concept was however not justifiable due to the difficulties involved in the retrofit and the upcoming retirement plans for the aircraft.

9. Over the last eighteen years, aircraft HUMS have progressed from a simple data acquisition system, predominantly hardware based, to more complex, software based integrated health monitoring (HM) systems.

Architecture

10. HUMS, is a system that is designed to support a variety of aircraft health and maintenance related issues including; engine performance, rotor track and balance, vibration absorber tuning, parameter accedence monitoring and, usage monitoring. The system is used to help improve aircraft safety, increase availability, increase reliability, and to decrease maintenance man-hours per flight hour by enabling fast determination of aircraft serviceability and assisting maintenance crews in diagnosing aircraft faults.

11. A standard HUMS system, as seen

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