Context
The customer detected that a clutch component inside the helicopter’s gearbox was tending to wear out faster than expected, leading to dangerous situations in flight. Analysis of this system, in order to verify the state of wear, requires complete disassembly of the gearbox, involving high engineering and maintenance costs and costly equipment downtime.
Need
To overcome the inconvenience of having to dismantle the gearbox, a vibration sensor was placed close to the sensitive clutch component. Using this data, the customer wishes to define a wear indicator for this component, and be alerted at the most opportune moment to replace it. In this way, they hope to optimize maintenance and reduce costs.
Solution
DiagFit was used to analyze several dozen flight hours. Following this analysis, and on the basis of the healthy clutch component data present in the flight hours, a wear level identification model was built.
Results
The wear indicator generated made it possible to observe on certain flights, sometimes 25 hours in advance, a level of wear that was very dangerous for the pilot and the helicopter.
Thanks to this early identification, DiagFit was able to trigger an alert and program the work order to replace the clutch component before it broke.
The customer can therefore plan equipment shutdown at the most opportune moment, and avoid costly repairs.
