Towards an integrated development of PHM systems for aircraft engines: In-design selection and validation of health indicators

This paper proposes an approach for the in-design selection and validation of health indicators (HI), based on a virtual prototype, which is part of a larger development scheme named integrated development of PHM. Physics-based modeling is combined with sensitivity analysis to select the most relevant HIs and then with uncertainty propagation to estimate the probability density functions of health indicators for both healthy and degraded states. The validation is then performed through the computation of original performance indicators. The methodology is finally applied to the selection and validation of health indicators for an aircraft fuel system and demonstrates its interest by assessing the performance that the user can expect in terms of detection, identification and localization.