The project smartHUMS is a joint research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) as part of the Aviation Research Programme (LuFo VI-1). The project focuses on the development of a Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) for monitoring and forecasting the technical condition of helicopter gearboxes and rotor blade e-actuators. The Institute of Flight Systems and Automatic Control is involved in the gearbox project part.

Health and Usage Monitoring Systems monitor and diagnose the condition of a technical system and thus enable the early detection of safety-critical system failures and the optimization of maintenance processes.

For this purpose, sensor information from the various subsystems is collected and evaluated. The challenge here is to provide sufficient quality and quantity of data to be able to take the effects of individual helicopter missions into account. For the integration of a HUMS into a maintenance operation it is furthermore necessary to highly automate the data processing by means of suitable algorithms.

The objective of the project is to develop an innovative HUMS concept that integrates the advantages of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) and enables the application of machine learning algorithms. For this purpose, the architecture of the sensor technology of helicopter gearboxes will be adapted to provide the best possible data basis. Subsequently, algorithms will be implemented that enable efficient and automated diagnosis and prognosis of the future system status and remaining useful life (RUL). The concept will be tested and evaluated with the help of a gearbox demonstrator. In addition to the technical properties, the focus will also be on approval-relevant questions regarding sensor technology and algorithms.

In the research project, the Institute of Flight Systems and Automatic Control (FSR) is responsible for the aspects of integrating efficient algorithms. For this, suitable algorithms for the various process steps are first researched, their properties and requirements are catalogued and evaluated. In parallel, a concept for a highly integrated sensor system is being developed that meets the requirements. The algorithms are initially developed with the help of synthetic data from a gearbox model. As soon as data from the gearbox demonstrator is available, it will be used to validate the algorithms.