Environmental Drivers on Degradation Characteristics: a Data Driven Approach

Abstract

Air forces demand aircraft availability for their operations. In order to increase this availability, there is a need for insight in the effect of environmental conditions on the usage profiles of components and systems. Existing frameworks and standards only provide for static environmental effects on component degradation. The research presented in this thesis aims to identify primary environmental drivers of deterioration for selected systems and components by modeling, implementing and subsequently verifying and validating these drivers on maintenance requirements.

In this research, a multi-level prognostic framework is proposed. The framework is tested and applied to a case-study within the Royal Netherlands Air Force at the NH90 program. Using Principle Component Analysis, coefficients for the first two components show that Relative Humidity, Sea Level Pressure and Temperature-related features are environmental drivers to the corrosion degradation characteristics of the NH90. These results are verified on the maintenance requirements of the RNLAF, which show an increase in system availability and less maintenance costs such as spare parts demand and required personnel.