An Integrated Vehicle Health Management Approach to Heterogeneous Structural Systems

PI: Aditi Chattopadhyay
Co-PIs: Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola and John Rajadas

The goal of NASA’s Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) program is to advance the state of highly integrated and complex light-critical health management technologies and systems. A total of 61 proposals were received and evaluated, and a total of eight awards were made, seven cooperative agreements were awarded to universities, and one contract was awarded to industry.

The IVHM project supports research and technologies that will lead to nearly continuous onboard situational awareness of the vehicle’s health state for use by the light crew, ground crew and maintenance depot. Improved safety and reliability must be achieved by onboard systems capable of performing self-diagnostics and self-correcting of anomalies that could otherwise go unattended until a critical failure occurs. A key enabling technology will be the ability for sharing and processing large amounts of information among the various vehicle subsystems to accurately identify system health state and execute the logic to self-correct any critical anomalies detected.

The ASU research addresses detection, diagnostics and prognostics in the area of IVHM. Specifically, computationally efficient multi-scale prognostic tools for airframe and propulsion structural components will be developed as part of an IVHM framework to significantly meet multiple challenges of

1) improving the safety of air transportation systems by reducing system or component failures,
2) decreasing operational costs and
3) increasing operational readiness

associated with current and next generation aircraft.