SBIR On Board With Engine Health Management Published Sept. 11, 2009 By Thomas Brown Propulsion WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- A successfully demonstrated Small Business Innovation Research outcome could ultimately pay dividends in the area of maintaining aircraft engine health, specifically in the fielding of low-cost, onboard, integrated engine health management systems for monitoring engine vibration and other key performance indicators. The newly validated SBIR product is a generic system--including hardware and software elements--developed based on two well-established, but distinct, existing systems: a Xilinx Virtex-IV Pro™ field-programmable gate array and a VxWorks™ real-time operating system. For the effort, which entailed ground demonstration of the integrated technology, the team configured the EHM system prototype to perform engine vibration monitoring, tower and gearbox health monitoring, and automated engine balancing for a C-17's F117 engine. The configuration also included a wireless capability for downloading on-wing health management data. The onboard setup collected data on various engine control inputs and outputs, and the ground station displayed summaries of vibration data, computed condition indicators, and gas path performance/health monitoring results. The generic system design accommodates not only the adaptations necessary for aircraft subsystem monitoring, but also the possible commercial applications related to land-based gas and wind turbine components. Researchers anticipate that this SBIR-enabled capability will also prove ideally suited both for third-party integration of new technologies and sensors as they emerge and for implementation of advanced algorithms needed for on-wing diagnostics.