Periodic preventive maintenance activities associated with aircraft subsystems is a significant part of the high costs associated with through life aircraft operations. Also, the understandably conservative approach to risk management, leads to premature component retirement, which is both highly inefficient and leading to a considerable carbon footprint. Minimising maintenance costs and carbon footprint are both major concerns within the whole of the aerospace industry.

If key components such as turbine engines had the ability to robustly, autonomously and continuously evaluate their structural health, and anticipate potential failures, maintenance costs could drastically decrease without compromising aircraft’s safety and reliability. This new maintenance paradigm of real-time in-situ health monitoring, would eliminate the need for the usual periodic preventive actions, allowing maintenance activities to evolve into a reactive paradigm, with extremely high savings as a result.

This project aimed at developing innovative technologies that will lead to reduce fuel consumption, noise and greenhouse gas emissions on power turboshaft engines. In order to provide useful data to optimize the development of each part of the turbo engine, Active Space Technologies SA (AST) proposes a solution for measuring in-situ strain and temperatures of the engine shaft.