Traditional scheduled maintenance systems are costly, labor intensive, and typically provide noncomprehensive detection and diagnosis of engine faults. The engine monitoring system (EMS) on modern aircrafts has the potential to provide maintenance personnel with valuable information for detecting and diagnosing engine faults. In this paper, an RBF neural network approach is applied to aeroengine gas path fault diagnosis. It can detect multiple faults and quantify the amount of deterioration of the various engine components as a function of measured parameters. The results obtained demonstrate that the accuracy of diagnosis is consistent with practical requirements. The approach takes advantage of the nonlinear mapping feature of neural networks to capture the appropriate characteristics of an aeroengine. The methodology is generic and applicable to other similar plants having high complexity.
