航空发动机是飞机的"心脏",其运行可靠性评估对保障飞行安全具有重要意义。受不同运行状况的影响,航空发动机退化程度和失效时间具有较大的离散性。针对单台航空发动机运行可靠性评估难以运用基于大样本统计的传统可靠性方法的问题,提出基于状态信息的航空发动机运行可靠性评估方法。该方法利用核主成分分析建立状态子空间,描述航空发动机状态性能的变化;计算正常状态与当前状态子空间基矢量的主夹角,利用映射函数将主夹角转化为运行可靠度。采用美国国家航空航天局提供的航空发动机全寿命仿真数据和某维修厂现场实测数据对所提出的方法进行验证,结果表明该方法能够合理地评估单台航空发动机的运行可靠性,为小样本条件下航空发动机运行可靠性评估提供有效手段。
The aero-engine is a pivotal component of an airplane. The operating reliability assessment of the aero-engine is greatly meaningful in guaranteeing the flight safety. In practice, operating conditions of the aero-engines vary. It leads to that degradation degrees and failure times for different aero-engines are with great degrees of discreteness. Aiming at solving the problem that reliability assessment methods based on probability statistical analysis are inappropriate to assess the reliability of the individual aero-engine, a novel method using the condition monitoring information is proposed. The condition subspace of the aero-engine is constructed by utilizing the Kernel principal component analysis(KPCA) to describe the performance change of the aero-engine. The principal angles between the subspaces from the normal state and the damage state are calculated. The principal angles are transformed into operating reliability index by a proper mapping function. The proposed method is validated by using both the aero-engine rim-to-failure data shared by National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the practical test data from a repair factory of aero-plane. The results illustrate the proposed method can assess the operating reliability of the aero-plane reasonably. It also offers valid approach for the operating reliability assessment of the aero-plane whose failure model subjects to small sample characteristics.