Jet Engine Health Mgmt Tech Support to RAF

Frontier Technology, Inc, (FTI) has been awarded a contract by the UK Ministry of Defence to apply it’s NormNet™ Engine Health Management technology to the Royal Air Force Typhoon Eurofighter. The contract calls for FTI to provide the Typhoon IPT with an enhanced prognostic health management (PHM) capability for its aircraft engines. By using NormNet™ to provide early warning of degrading conditions and to accurately identify the operational impact, the Typhoon IPT will be able to:

Improve aircraft availability and mission effectiveness.

Minimize unplanned outages and in-flight interruptions.

Reduce major or catastrophic failures.

Decrease engine and aircraft downtime.

Increase safety.

Improve maintenance and mission planning.

The Typhoon is an agile, single seat, multi-role aircraft optimized for high altitude supersonic air combat but also capable of operating at much lower levels in the air-to-ground roles. It is built by a four-nation consortium comprised of companies from the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. The state-of-the art aircraft is set to be the RAF's major front-line type for many years to come, replacing the RAF's Tornado F3 fighters and Jaguar fighter-bombers in front-line service. Typhoon is powered by two Rolls Royce Eurofighter EJ200 engines.

FTI’s NormNet™ is a component of the company’s family of NormNet™ Prognostic Health Management Systems. Based on FTI’s patented Pattern Recognition of Health technology, NormNet™ has been designed to meet the dynamic and rapidly-changing environment present in a military fighter aircraft. Using existing and available information about an engine, NormNet™ creates a statistical model of normal operations – a healthy system. Potential problems are identified by small variances from expected system behavior that are also precursors of future failures. NormNet™ has the ability to process input from multiple sensors, sampled at rates as fast as 250 milliseconds, while detecting variances from expected performance as small as 2%.

FTI will work with the Typhoon IPT and the Propulsion Generation Group to select and configure the data that will be used by NormNet™ and to demonstrate the technology’s ability to identify both normal and abnormal engine operations.