BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

In general, a component of the air management system of an aircraft is a heat exchanger, which ensures proper cooling of the engine bleed air. Typically, aircraft heat exchangers suffer from performance degradation due to a phenomenon called fouling. Fouling occurs when unwanted accumulation of external substances, debris, and/or organisms contaminate a surface of heat exchanger fins. Further, complex environments, such as aerospace systems, operate under varying altitudes levels, ambient temperatures, passenger loads, and other uncertainties that make fouling diagnosis very challenging. Moreover, determining the critical sensors to analyze for fouling diagnosis is difficult due to the interconnections and interdependencies between different components and sensors.

To detect fouling, current methodologies are based on regular physical inspection or observing off-nominal events in sensor data. These events are triggered if sensor data crosses simple thresholds that limit detection to a binary mechanism. These methodologies are also prone to high false alarm rate and missed detections. Furthermore, since the air management system has a large sensor suite, large amount of data are generated that make the analysis computationally complex. Further, the current methodologies do not perform multi-nary classification of fouling severities, do not present the correct classification rate (CCR) and the false alarm rate, do not address the problem of optimal sensor selection and fusion for fouling diagnosis, and are also very susceptible to noise in the data.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

According to one embodiment, a method of determining whether a heat exchanger is fouling comprises training classifiers indicative of a plurality of fouling conditions associated with the heat exchanger, the heat exchanger being within a complex networked system herein the air management system; and testing the classifiers with optimal sensor data from optimal sensors to determine whether the fouling is being experienced by the heat exchanger.

According to another embodiment, a computer program product comprises a computer readable storage medium having program instructions for determining whether a heat exchanger is fouling embodied therewith. The program instructions are executable by a processor to cause the processor to perform a training of classifiers indicative of a plurality of fouling conditions associated with the heat exchanger, the heat exchanger being within a complex networked system; and a testing of the classifiers with optimal sensor data from optimal sensors to determine whether the fouling is being experienced by the heat exchanger.

Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of embodiments herein. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention. For a better understanding of the invention with the advantages and the features, refer to the description and to the drawings.

