The European Union's Technologies and Techniques for New Maintenance (TATEM) concepts project has completed its definition of a future integrated health management architecture.
With one more year to go for the four-year €40 million ($53.7 million) Sixth Framework research project, which began in March 2004, its focus is to build and integrate the architecture's elements at a subsystem, system, aircraft and fleet level.
The next 12-months of physical integration work is to be complemented by a model-based cost-benefit assessment of the TATEM technologies and processes on current and future aircraft operations.
In a statement released at the Paris air show the project partners said: "One of the key underpinning technologies in the new approach is the use of prognostics to enable predictive maintenance planning."
The aim of the project is to demonstrate the means to achieve a 20% reduction in airline maintenance related costs within 10 years and a 50% reduction over 20 years.
To achieve this TATEM is focused on maintenance-free avionics signal processing techniques to convert aircraft performance data into information about utilities, actuation, engines and structural systems' health novel on-board sensor technology to gather that data diagnostic methods to identify and locate failures and malfunctions to reduce no fault found alarms and decision support techniques to generate instructions for maintenance engineers. The project has 57 contractors from 12 countries across Europe, Israel and Australia.
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Source: Flight International
