Usage Monitoring of Helicopter Gearboxes with ADS-B Flight Data

Health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS) are the basis for condition-based maintenance of helicopters. One of the most critical systems in terms of safety and maintenance expense that can be monitored by HUMS are the main gearboxes of helicopters with turbine engines. While the health monitoring part of HUMS aims to model the health state from the collected sensor data with advanced algorithms, such as machine learning, the usage monitoring part tracks the time of use and operating parameters of the system, such as load, to determine lifetime consumption. In the presented work, a combination of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) flight data with a generic helicopter performance model is used to acquire torque profiles of the gearboxes. With damage accumulation methods, the load spectra are transformed to aggregated indicators that reflect the individual gearbox usage. The methodology is applied to samples of two helicopters from a five-year ADS-B data set of German helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) acquired for the study. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the generic approach, which can support maintenance scheduling and new usage-based maintenance services independent of direct access to installed HUMS.