Helicopter Bolt Loosening Monitoring using Vibrations and Machine Learning

Abstract

The existing helicopter Health and Usage Management Systems (HUMS) collect and process flight operational parameters and sensors data such as vibrations to provide health monitoring of the helicopter dynamic assemblies and engines. So far, structure-related mechanical faults, such as looseness in bolted structures, have not been addressed by vibration-based condition monitoring in existing HUMS systems. Bolt loosening was identified as a potential risk to flight safety demanding periodical visual monitoring, and increased maintenance and repair expenses. Its automatic identification in helicopters by using vibration measurements is challenging due to the limited number of known events and the presence of high-energy vibrations originating in rotating parts, which shadow the low-level signals generated by the bolt loosening.

New developed bolt loosening monitoring approach was tested on HUMS vibrations data recorded from the IAF AH-64 Apache helicopters fleet. ML-based unsupervised anomaly detection was utilized in order to address the limited number of faulty cases. The predictive power of health features was significantly improved by applying the Harmonic filtering differentiating between the high-energy vibrations generated by rotating parts compared with the low-energy structural vibrations. Different unsupervised anomaly detection techniques were examined on the dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed approach enable successful bolt loosening monitoring in helicopters and can potentially be used in other health monitoring applications.