Fundamentals of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for Aerospace Systems

With the world aircraft fleets growing exponentially, the maintenance burden on airlines is also becoming overwhelming. One way to counter this is by making systems “smarter” so that they can self-diagnose themselves, help with troubleshooting, and estimate remaining useful life. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is the engineering discipline that forms the basis for developing such smart systems. In this course, the basic tenets of PHM will be taught with an emphasis on the practical application of PHM to aerospace systems. This will include the concept of “health-readiness” and how it can be incorporated using simple built-in-tests to advanced model-based diagnostics and prognostics functions. By delivering predictive maintenance and continuous remaining useful life estimates, these systems can reduce aftermarket costs by 25% or more and increase operational availability by 15% or more. This has been proven over many years of experience in the aerospace sector. However, developing these systems is not easy because they cut across many different disciplines and subsystems. At the end of this course, the participant will be fully knowledgeable about the high-level aspects of how PHM systems are designed and implemented. How they are tested, and how they can be certified. It will also emphasize the critical aspect of systems engineering and why that is crucial to developing viable PHM systems.