DEFINITION:

Engine health monitoring is the assessment of engine physical condition by monitoring and interpreting available engine instrumentation and operation cycles, in order to detect incipient trouble in advance of critical anomalies. Health monitoring techniques have evolved from flight engineer/pilot tasks through visual and tactile cues available on cockpit gages to automatically monitored data on on-board computer, transferred in real time or differed time to ground station for analysis.

(Source: ACARE Domain 311)

SUBDOMAINS:

Future trends are towards an increase in the sophistication of on-board and ground-based engine monitoring and maintenance systems including dedicated on-board diagnostic processors and algorithms, advanced diagnostics and prognostics instrumentation with fault accommodating logic. The ultimate vision is a combined monitoring system that applies prognostics within an engine health management system to allow aircraft operators to automatically track remaining life of engine component. In addition processing of signals such as vibrations and acoustic signature should be developed to identify and locate mechanical incipient failures ( disk or blade crack initiation, bearing wear,..)