Aerospace

This paper describes the relative frequency of reports of oil and hydraulic fluid fumes in the ventilation supply air (“fume events”) compared to other types of fumes and smoke reported by U.S. airlines over 10 years. The author reviewed and categorized 12,417 fume/smoke reports submitted to the aviation regulator to comply with the primary maintenance reporting regulation (14 CFR § 121.703) from 2002–2011. The most commonly documented category of onboard fumes/smoke was electrical (37%). Combining the categories of “bleed-sourced”, “oil”, and “hydraulic fluid” created the second most prevalent category (26%). The remaining sources of onboard fumes/smoke are also reported. To put the data in context, the fume event reporting regulations are described, along with examples of ways in which certain events are underreported. These data were reported by U.S. airlines, but aviation regulations are harmonized globally, so the data likely also reflect onboard sources of fumes and smoke reported in other countries with equivalent aviation systems. The data provide insight into the relative frequency of the types of reported fumes and smoke on aircraft, which should drive design, operational, and maintenance actions to mitigate onboard exposure. The data also provide insight into how to improve current fume event reporting rules. Full article

Aircraft performance and noise database together with operational weights (depending on flight distances) and operational procedures (including low noise procedures) significantly influence results of noise exposure contour maps assessment in conditions of real atmosphere. Current recommendations of the Standard SAE-AIR1845A allow the definition of flight profiles via solutions of balanced motion equations. However, differences are still supervised between the measured sound level data and calculated ones, especially in assessing the single flight noise events. Some of them are well explained by differences between balanced flight parameters (thrust and velocity first of all) and monitored ones by the traffic control system. Statistical data were gathered to make more general view on these differences and some proposal to use them in calculations has been proven. Besides, the real meteorological parameters provide inhomogeneous atmosphere conditions always, which are quite different from the main assumptions of the SAE-AIR1845A, stipulating inaccuracies of sound level calculations. Full article

Several safety-related improvements are applied every year to try to minimize the total number of civil aviation accidents. Fortunately, these improvements work well, reducing the number of accident occurrences. However, while the number of accidents due to mechanical failures has decreased, the number of accidents due to human errors seems to grow. On that basis, this work presents a contribution regarding the brain’s $\beta$-band activities for different levels of volunteers’ expertise on flight simulator, i.e., experienced, mid-level and beginner, in which they acted as pilots in command during several simulated flights. Spectrogram analysis and statistical measurements of each volunteer’s brain’s $\beta$-band were carried out. These were based on seven flight tasks: takeoff, climb, cruise flight, descent, approach, final approach and landing. The results of the proposed experiment showed that the takeoff, approach and landing corresponded to the highest brain activities, i.e., close to 37.06–67.33% more than the brain activity of the other flight tasks: when some accidents were about to occur, the intensities of the brain activity were similar to those of the final approach task. When the volunteers’ expertise and confidence on flight simulation were considered, it was shown that the highest brain magnitudes and oscillations observed of more experienced and confident volunteers were on average close to $68.44\%$ less, compared to less experienced and less confident volunteers. Moreover, more experienced and confident volunteers in general presented different patterns of brain activities compared to volunteers with less expertise or less familiarity with fight simulations and/or electronic games. Full article

X-ray computed tomography is more often applied in non-destructive testing the quality of construction elements significantly crucial for reliability and safety of device elements, machines and complex industrial systems. This article describes the computed tomography (CT) system used to inspect the technical condition of turbine blades of the aircraft engine. The impact of the experimental conditions on the correctness of the obtained results was determined. The appropriate selection of parameters for the experiment was given, and the correct test results of gas turbine blades were presented. Failures, manufacturing defects, material deviations of nickel-cobalt alloyed blades were identified. The thickness of walls was measured in the selected cross-sections with the accuracy of 0.01 mm, and selected manufacturing defects of cooling passages were diagnosed. It was demonstrated that the application of the CT system allows for detailed non-destructive inspection of the technical condition of machine parts. The test results proved that the X-ray computed tomography could be applied in the production and repairs of machines. Full article

Aerospace systems are connected with the operational environment and other systems in general. The focus in aerospace product development is consequently shifting from a singular system perspective to a System-of-Systems (SoS) perspective. This increasing complexity gives rise to new levels of uncertainty that must be understood and managed to produce aerospace solutions for an ever-changing future. This paper presents an approach to using architecture frameworks, and ontologies with description logic reasoning capabilities, to break down SoS needs into required capabilities and functions. The intention of this approach is to provide a consistent way of obtaining the functions to be realized in order to meet the overarching capabilities and needs of an SoS. The breakdown with an architecture framework results in an initial design space representation of functions to be performed. The captured knowledge is then represented in an ontology with description logic reasoning capabilities, which provides a more flexible way to expand and process the initial design space representation obtained from the architecture framework. The proposed approach is ultimately tested in a search and rescue case study, partly based on the operations of the Swedish Maritime Administration. The results show that it is possible to break down SoS needs in a consistent way and that ontology with description logic reasoning can be used to process the captured knowledge to both expand and reduce an available design space representation. Full article

Risk assessment methods are widely used in aviation, but have not been demonstrated for visual inspection of aircraft engine components. The complexity in this field arises from the variety of defect types and the different manifestation thereof with each level of disassembly. A new risk framework was designed to include contextual factors. Those factors were identified using Bowtie analysis to be criticality, severity, and detectability. This framework yields a risk metric that describes the extent to which a defect might stay undetected during the inspection task, and result in adverse safety outcomes. A simplification of the framework provides a method for go/no-go decision-making. The results of the study reveal that the defect detectability is highly dependent on specific views of the blade, and the risk can be quantified. Defects that involve material separation or removal such as scratches, tip rub, nicks, tears, cracks, and breaking, are best shown in airfoil views. Defects that involve material deformation and change of shape, such as tip curl, dents on the leading edges, bents, and battered blades, have lower risk if edge views can be provided. This research proposes that many risk assessments may be reduced to three factors: consequence, likelihood, and a cofactor. The latter represents the industrial context, and can comprise multiple sub-factors that are application-specific. A method has been devised, including appropriate scales, for the inclusion of these into the risk assessment. Full article

The film-cooling performance of a 2.5D braided ceramic matrix composite (CMC) plate with preformed holes was numerically studied. Four numerical models containing braided structures were established: one model with film-cooling holes preformed through fiber extrusion deformation (EP-Hole), one model with film-cooling holes directly woven through fibers (WP-Hole), and two models with directly drilled holes (DP-Hole1,2). Besides, the influence of the ratio between the equivalent thermal conductivities on the axial and radial directions of fiber Kr was investigated. The results show that the preformed holes have better performance in controlling the thermal gradient with the increase of Kr. The maximum thermal gradient around the DP-Hole is significantly higher than that of the WP-Hole and EP-Hole, and the maximum relative variation reaches 123.3%. With Kr increasing from 3.32 to 13.05, the overall cooling effectiveness on the hot-side wall decreases for all models, by about 10%. Compared with the traditional drill method, the new preformed film-cooling hole studied in this paper can reduce the temperature and the thermal gradient in the region around the holes. Full article

Aircraft trajectory prediction is the basis of approach and departure sequencing, conflict detection and resolution and other air traffic management technologies. Accurate trajectory prediction can help increase the airspace capacity and ensure the safe and orderly operation of aircraft. Current research focuses on single aircraft trajectory prediction without considering the interaction between aircraft. Therefore, this paper proposes a model based on the Social Long Short-Term Memory (S-LSTM) network to realize the multi-aircraft trajectory collaborative prediction. This model establishes an LSTM network for each aircraft and a pooling layer to integrate the hidden states of the associated aircraft, which can effectively capture the interaction between them. This paper takes the aircraft trajectories in the Northern California terminal area as the experimental data. The results show that, compared with the mainstream trajectory prediction models, the S-LSTM model in this paper has smaller prediction errors, which proves the superiority of the model’s performance. Additionally, another comparative experiment is conducted on airspace scenes with aircraft interactions, and it is found that S-LSTM has a better prediction effect than LSTM, which proves the effectiveness of the former considering aircraft interaction. Full article

Self-oscillations are one of the common problems in the complex automatic system, that can occur due to the features of the workflow and the design of the governor. The development of digital control systems has made it possible to damp self-oscillations by applying complex control laws. However, for hydromechanical systems, such way is unacceptable due to the design complexity and the governor cost. The objective of this work is to determine the parameters of the hydromechanical free turbine speed controller, ensuring the absence of self-oscillations during ground tests of the turboshaft engine with a hydraulic dynamometer. The TV3-117VM engine (Ukraine) with the NR-3VM regulator pump (Ukraine) was selected as the object of the study. However, self-oscillations can also occur in any modifications of the TV3-117 engine with any NR-3 regulator pump. The results of the research may be of interest to engineers and scientists who investigate the dynamics of automatic control systems for similar engines. The paper analyses the nonlinear features of the empirical characteristics of the FTSC leading to self-oscillations of the engine speed. The authors propose the mathematical model of the automatic control system dynamics, which takes into account all the features of the engine and regulator pump. It is shown that the load characteristics of the water brake and the helicopter main rotor can differ significantly. Research of the dynamic characteristics of the TV3-117VM engine was carried out. The analysis showed a good agreement between the calculation results and the field test results, and made it possible to determine the parameters of the controller, which lead to self-oscillations during test. Two cases are considered. The first case includes ground tests of the engine with a water brake; the second case—flight tests of the engine as part of the helicopter’s power plant. The data obtained make it possible to develop recommendations for adjusting the hydromechanical governor without testing it on the engine. Full article

This paper presents a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to optimize the long-term scheduling of maintenance for an aircraft fleet. The problem considers fleet status, maintenance capacity, and other maintenance constraints to schedule hangar checks for a specified time horizon. The checks are scheduled within an interval, and the goal is to, schedule them as close as possible to their due date. In doing so, the number of checks is reduced, and the fleet availability increases. A Deep Q-learning algorithm is used to optimize the scheduling policy. The model is validated in a real scenario using maintenance data from 45 aircraft. The maintenance plan that is generated with our approach is compared with a previous study, which presented a Dynamic Programming (DP) based approach and airline estimations for the same period. The results show a reduction in the number of checks scheduled, which indicates the potential of RL in solving this problem. The adaptability of RL is also tested by introducing small disturbances in the initial conditions. After training the model with these simulated scenarios, the results show the robustness of the RL approach and its ability to generate efficient maintenance plans in only a few seconds. Full article

In the process of aircraft maintenance and support, a large amount of fault description text data is recorded. However, most of the existing fault diagnosis models are based on structured data, which means they are not suitable for unstructured data such as text. Therefore, a text-driven aircraft fault diagnosis model is proposed in this paper based on Word to Vector (Word2vec) and prior-knowledge Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The fault text first enters Word2vec to perform text feature extraction, and the extracted text feature vectors are then input into the proposed prior-knowledge CNN to train the fault classifier. The prior-knowledge CNN introduces expert fault knowledge through Cloud Similarity Measurement (CSM) to improve the performance of the fault classifier. Validation experiments on five-year maintenance log data of a civil aircraft were carried out to successfully verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Full article

The potential of sol–gel-based optical sensors is investigated for applications in the aerospace domain. To this aim, a low-cost and non-intrusive sol–gel sensor based on waveguides, arranged as a 2D matrix structure, is fabricated by UV photolithography for delamination and damage detection. Two different organic–inorganic sol–gels were selected to fabricate the photonic device: TiO₂–SiO₂ and ZrO₂–SiO_2, acting as the waveguide core and the cladding, respectively. A systematic study was performed to determine the manufacturing parameters controlling their properties. The results show that large surfaces can be functionalized via sol–gel methods using the direct laser-writing approach. The structures are characterized in terms of refractive index, and the guiding properties were investigated through simulations and experiments, indicating an excellent behavior regarding the light guidance in a straight waveguide or in the 2D matrix structure grid. Additionally, preliminary tests show that the presence of impact can be easily detected after damage through the induced optical losses on large surfaces. This proof of concept sensor is a promising tool for structural health monitoring. To achieve the ultimate goal, the integration of this photonic sensor will be later performed on aircraft wings. Full article

Active fault-tolerant control systems perform fault diagnosis and reconfigurable control. There is a bidirectional uncertainty between them, and an integrated scheme is proposed here to account for that. The system considers both actuator and sensor faults, as well as the external disturbance. The diagnostic module is designed using an unknown input observer, and the controller is constructed on the basis of an adaptive method. The integrated strategy is presented, and the stability of the overall system is analyzed. Moreover, different kinds of anti-windup techniques are utilized to modify the original controllers, because of the different controller structures. A simulation of the integrated anti-windup fault-tolerant control method is demonstrated using a numerical model of Boeing 747. The results show that it can guarantee the stability of the post-fault aircraft and increase the control performance for the overall faulty system. Full article

Solar particle events (SPEs) can pose serious threats for future crewed missions to the Moon. Historically, there have been several extreme SPEs that could have been dangerous for astronauts, and thus analyzing their potential risk on humans is an important step towards space exploration. In this work, we study the effects of a well-known SPE that occurred on 23 February 1956 on a mission in cis-Lunar space. Estimates of the proton fluence spectra of the February 1956 event were obtained from three different parameterized models published within the past 12 years. The studied geometry consists of a female phantom in the center of spherical spacecraft shielded by aluminum area densities ranging from 0.4 to 40 g cm${}^{-2}$. The effective dose, along with lens, skin, blood forming organs, heart, and central nervous system doses, were tallied using the On Line Tool for the Assessment of Radiation In Space (OLTARIS), which utilizes the High Z and Energy TRansport code (HZETRN), a deterministic radiation transport code. Based on the parameterized models, the results herein show that thicknesses comparable to a spacesuit might not protect against severe health consequences from a February 1956 category event. They also show that a minimum aluminum shielding of around 20 g cm${}^{-2}$ is sufficient to keep the effective dose and critical organ doses below NASA’s permissible limits for such event. In addition, except for very thin shielding, the input models produced results that were within good agreement, where the doses obtained from the three proton fluence spectra tended to converge with slight differences as the shielding thickness increases. Full article

This study used pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) and determined the surface pressure distributions for a compressible swept convex-corner flow. The freestream Mach numbers were 0.64 and 0.83. The convex-corner angle and swept angle were, respectively, 10–17° and 5–15°. Expansion and compression near the corner apex were clearly visualized. For the test case of shock-induced boundary layer separation, there were greater spanwise pressure gradient and curved shocks. The acquired PSP data agree with the experimental data measured using the Kulite pressure transducers for a subsonic expansion flow. For a transonic expansion flow, the discrepancy was significant. The assumption of a constant recovery factor is not valid in the separation region, and temperature correction for PSP measurements is required. Full article

This research aimed to determine riveted carbon/epoxy composites’ mechanical performance when fabricated by resin transfer molding (RTM). As this manufacturing process is gaining importance in the aeronautics and automotive industries, assembly methods and their reliability must be studied in terms of their airworthiness and transportation implementation. The study case resumes the determination of the bearing strength of RTM-woven carbon composites for different rivet joint diameters (1/8, 5/32 and 3/16 in). The joint shear strength was obtained following the ASTM D5961 instructions, and post-failure analysis was carried out by a computerized tomography scan. A residual strength curve is provided with the results to infer the bearing strength for the riveted composites as a function of the rivet width-to-diameter ratio. A discussion of the fracture mechanism and tensile strength is carried out to assess the understanding of the riveted woven composites. Full article

Airworthiness standards of Korea recommend verifying structural safety by experimental tests and analytical methods, owing to the development of analysis technology. In this study, we propose a methodology to verify the structural safety of aircraft components based on airworthiness requirements using an analytical method. The structural safety and fatigue integrity of a linear actuator for flap control of aircraft was evaluated through numerical analysis. The static and fatigue analyses for the given loads obtained from the multibody dynamics analysis were performed using the finite element method. Subsequently, the margin of safety and vulnerable area were acquired and the feasibility of the structural safety evaluation using the analytical method was confirmed. The proposed numerical analysis method in this study can be adopted as an analytical verification methodology for the airworthiness standards of civilian aircraft in Korea. Full article