A Multistage Nonlinear Method for Aeroengine Health Parameter Estimation Based on Adjacent Operating Points

Health parameter estimation is the core of engine gas path analysis (GPA), which is widely adopted for engine safety improvement, as well as for operation and maintenance cost reduction. The major challenge of GPA lies in the contradiction between the high dimensions of parameters under estimation, e.g., health parameters, and the limited measurements obtainable from a small number of sensors. Existent GPA methods for health parameters commonly apply dimension reduction before estimation, leading to information loss and hence inaccurate estimation. To tackle the challenge of limited sensor measurements and to have more system outputs than parameters under estimation, we proposed to augment the output vector of the system model by combining the measurements from multiple adjacent operating points. But the engine model can face the problem of homogenization if using data from adjacent operating points. This can, in turn, lead to a low identifiability of parameters. We analyze the internal mechanism of such large deviation of the parameter estimation results based on linear models and argue for the need of nonlinear method. Hence, we propose a multistage nonlinear parameter estimation method for health parameters, combining biased and unbiased estimation. In our extensive simulations based on 10 output measurements of a JT9D engine, our method can estimate 130% more parameters than the widely used GPA method, while reducing the maximum estimation error of health parameters from 2.2% to 0.1%.