Measurement and Monitoring of Energy Consumption in Aviation: Diagnostics and Detection of Degradations

State-of-the-Art in aviation

The current trend in the modern aircraft industry is the concept of More Electric Aircraft (MEA). The basic idea of the MEA concept is replacing the pneumatic, hydraulic and partly mechanical systems with an electric on. This innovation reduces the weight of the aircraft which leads to lower fuel consumption and emissions of air pollutant gases. Moreover, the MEA concept brings other of advantages such as optimizing the aircraft performance and decreasing the operation and maintenance costs .

Power systems of conventional aircraft
Power systems of conventional aircraft

The expansion of electric systems provides possibilities to use energy consumption-based diagnostic methods. Methods such as NILM (Nonintrusive Appliance Load Monitoring), the model-based monitoring or the methods based on transient events can be utilized for monitoring of a proper operation of aircraft systems, condition monitoring, fault detection, diagnosis, and prognosis.

Dissertation topics:

  • Identifying a specific system of an aircraft such as ECS, APU, electric-motor-driven hydraulic pumps or wing ice protection system where the energy consumption diagnosis brings a benefit
  • Application of FDD methods on a real system