Gas turbine engines with prolonged exposure to sand and dust are susceptible to component and performance degradation and ultimately engine failure. Hal Technologys proprietary, compact, rugged, flush-mounted, fiber-optic sensor platform measures particulate size, size distributions, and concentration for real-time engine health monitoring. Our proposed sensor will use an innovative hybrid discrimination approach to incorporate material identification along with size, size distributions, and concentration while maintaining the form factor of the current sensor platform. We will use a systematic test matrix to demonstrate this advanced prototype sensors capabilities. The sensor platform performs non-intrusive particle measurements with a multiplexed sensor head that has implementation flexibility, reduced thermal management requirements, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and potentially low cost. Our sensor can be integrated into an engine control system to allow early warning of excessive dust loading and provide information to help manage the health and durability of an aero-turbine engine.
Benefit: Although the sensor will be initially designed for military aero-turbine engines, the sensor and sensor system developed by this contract are also applicable for engine health protection and health management in civilian aircraft engines and any other types of non-aircraft engines including industrial engines, power generation engines, land-based engines, marine engines, or similar. The compact sensor is applicable to both air and liquid contamination monitoring markets.
Keywords: particulate load rate, particulate load rate, Particle size, material identification, fiber-optic particle sensor, Engine Health Monitoring, Light scattering, turbine blade erosion, Particle concentration
