Predictive maintenance of aircraft engines

Use of a digital twin for predictive maintenance of aircraft engines

Digital twins increasingly play an important role in industry. They offer a universal platform for the administration, control and monitoring of machines, plants, and even individual products throughout their entire life cycle. However, the resulting advantages in areas such as predictive maintenance can only be as good as the underlying data and models.

 

In order to optimise maintenance intervals to meet requirements, and allow them to be controlled for individual aircraft, a digital twin based on CFD and FEM simulations was created and validated for our customer Lufthansa Technik AG.

 

In order to create a digital twin, the following steps were worked through:

  • Setup of the simulation workflow in ANSYS® CFX and ANSYS® Mechanical
  • Organisation of the simulations using optiSLang
  • Creation of the field meta-model using Statistics on Structures
  • Provision of data for further evaluations

 

The use of a digital twin allows flight data to be analysed within a few seconds, with extremely precise results. This provides reliable data within a very short time, which can be used for the predictive maintenance of aircraft engines, but also for the preparation of maintenance contracts that are tailored to requirements.

 

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