Aircraft Auxiliary Power Unit Condition Monitoring PhD

This PhD project offers a unique opportunity for an enthusiastic and self-driven engineer, who wants to work on real world problems. The work will involve the design and construction of test equipment, and full scale experimentation on the Cranfield University’s B737-400 aircraft. The opportunity offers very strong link with industry and an existing program, based on aircraft sub-systems (ECS, APU), to deliver.

The research work consists of development of an on-board ground test facility, targeting the acoustic, vibration, and aircraft state data monitoring of the B737-400 APU under wide range of operating scenarios. The successful implementation will require instrumentation of the APU unit with commercial off-the shelf sensors and their integration with an efficient data acquisition unit. The development of a design of experiment plan for testing, collection and processing of data under wide-range of health states.

The scientific novelty in this research is in the fusion of data from the multiple sensors to form a reliable judgement towards the condition monitoring of aircraft APU system. The outcome of this research will be a Mid-TRL system demonstrator that can enable full scale experimental investigation of aircraft APU.

As a part of working in this industrially sponsored project, the student will work in close collaboration with The Boeing Company. He/she will need to present their research findings regularly to the project team and will be responsible for the timely delivery of the project deliverables in addition to his/her academic reporting.

The student will be based at Cranfield University in the Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre, which is part of the Manufacturing Department. The student will have the opportunity to work with experts in the diagnostics, prognostics and condition monitoring field, as well as being part of our strong and dynamic research centre at Canfield University.