After two decades working at the forefront of health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS), UTC Aerospace Systems is continuing to develop and augment the technology through its new Pulse and structural health monitoring systems.
The Pulse system is a lightweight, scalable health management system designed to enable real-time evaluation of an aircraft’s condition, while the structural health monitoring system promises to bring the benefits of HUMS-style monitoring to an aircraft’s structural components.
After signing a licensing agreement with Metis Design Corporation in 2016, UTC Aerospace Systems has been putting the two systems through flight trials with the U.S. Air Force in the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy.
“The goal is to be able to offer a modular scalable system that addresses the entire aircraft, both the mechanicals as well as the airframe,” said Kevin Hawko, business development manager, vehicle health, sensors & integrated systems at UTC Aerospace Systems. “We’ve been working with Metis to productionize the hardware solutions and bring forward a robust packaging that will support aerospace applications. We’re about a year and a half into the journey.”
The trials so far have sought to validate the capabilities of the system to find damage in the C-5’s troop deck flooring, as well as an additional project with the Navy to assess composite bond line delamination. The system will also be able to detect cracking and fatigue in metals.
“We’re looking at a number of different applications that we think will be the fastest applications out of the box to demonstrate the value of this system and to help customers find damage in their aircraft,” said Hawko. “It will reduce the amount of manual inspection and aircraft downtime typically associated with finding structural issues. [It will] identify problems, and trend and assess the severity of them to allow operators to take appropriate action.”
One of the first production applications UTC Aerospace Systems is targeting for the system is with the U.S. Marine Corps Sikorsky CH-53K, and Hawko said he hoped to soon expand its use to commercial applications.
The company has been working with HUMS systems for almost 20 years, beginning with its involvement with the Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey in the late ’90s. It then secured its biggest HUMS contract with the U.S. Army’s Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk.
“We’ve evolved the HUMS product significantly since then, but that’s where we cut our teeth and gained most of our experience,” said Hawko, referencing the Black Hawk. “The legacy systems that we’ve fielded in the past were large, heavy, federated systems. The next-generation UTAS Pulse vehicle health products have evolved into a distributed digital architecture able to support commercial applications and beyond.”
