Browsing by Author "Phillips, Paul"

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    The adoption and use of Through-life Engineering Services within UK Manufacturing Organisations
    (Sage, 2014-07-18) Redding, Louis E.; Tiwari, Ashutosh; Roy, Rajkumar; Phillips, Paul; Shaw, Andrew
    Manufacturing organisations seek ever more innovative approaches in order to maintain and improve their competitive position within the global market. One such initiative that is gaining significance is ‘through-life engineering services’. These seek to adopt ‘whole life’ service support through the greater understanding of component and system performance driven by knowledge gained from maintenance, repair and overhaul activities. This research presents the findings of exploratory research based on a survey of UK manufacturers who provide through-life engineering services. The survey findings illustrate significant issues to be addressed within the field before the concept becomes widely accepted. These include a more proactive approach to maintenance activities based on real-time responses; standardisation of data content, structure, collection, storage and retrieval protocols in support of maintenance; the development of clear definitions, ontologies and a taxonomy of through-life engineering services in support of the service delivery system; lack of understanding of component and system performance due to the presence of ‘No Fault Found’ events that skew maintenance metrics and the increased use of radio-frequency identification technology in support of maintenance data acquisition.
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    Degradation study of heat exchangers
    (Elsevier, 2015-10-27) Addepalli, Sri; Eiroa, David; Lieotrakool, Suphansa; Francois, Anne-Laure; Guisset, Juliette; Sanjaime, David; Kazarian, Michele; Duda, Julia; Roy, Rajkumar; Phillips, Paul
    Abstract This study mainly deals with the evaluation of various degradation mechanisms that heat exchangers are susceptible to with an aim of evaluating future design requirements. A heat exchanger is a heat management system that uses fluids to transfer heat from one medium to the other; the most common types of fluids being air, water, oil or specialised coolant mixtures. As part of this study a failure analysis of heat exchangers was carried out on selected heat exchangers used in both aerospace and automotive sectors. This study was then extended to designing test-rigs supporting two types of heat exchangers. For this study, an air-to-air and an oil-to-air heat exchanger test rigs were designed. Temperature, pressure and flow sensors were introduced in the test rig designs to monitor the flow characteristics in order to determine if degradations occurring as a result of operation have an impact on them. As part of the initial evaluation both visual inspection and pulsed thermography inspection were selected as suitable inspection methods to evaluate their in-service condition. Some heat exchanger units where then subjected to accelerated corrosion tests and their performance was monitored using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements. The outcomes of the study presented in this paper confirm the suitability and adaptability of thermography in detecting degradations occurring in heat exchangers.
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    No Fault Found events in maintenance engineering Part 1: current trends, implications and organizational practices
    (Elsevier, 2013-12-01) Khan, Samir; Phillips, Paul; Jennions, Ian K.; Hockley, Chris
    This paper presents the first part of a state of the art review on the No Fault Found (NFF) phenomenon. The aim has been to compile a systematic reference point for burgeoning NFF literature, and to provide a comprehensive overview for gaining an understanding of NFF knowledge and concepts. Increasing systems complexities have seen a rise in the number of unknown failures that are being reported during operational service. Units tagged as ‘NFF’ are evidence that a serviceable component was removed, and attempts to troubleshoot the root cause have been unsuccessful. There are many reasons on how these failures manifest themselves and these papers describe the prominent issues that have persisted across a variety of industrial applications and processes for decades. This article, in particular, deals with the impact of NFF from an organizational culture and human factors point of view. It also highlights recent developments in NFF standards, its financial implications and safety concerns.
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    No Fault Found events in maintenance engineering Part 2: Root causes, technical developments and future research
    (Elsevier, 2013-12-01) Khan, Samir; Phillips, Paul; Hockley, Chris; Jennions, Ian K.
    This is the second half of a two paper series covering aspects of the no fault found (NFF) phenomenon, which is highly challenging and is becoming even more important due to increasing complexity and criticality of technical systems. Part 1 introduced the fundamental concept of unknown failures from an organizational, behavioral and cultural stand point. It also reported an industrial outlook to the problem, recent procedural standards, whilst discussing the financial implications and safety concerns. In this issue, the authors examine the technical aspects, reviewing the common causes of NFF failures in electronic, software and mechanical systems. This is followed by a survey on technological techniques actively being used to reduce the consequence of such instances. After discussing improvements in testability, the article identifies gaps in literature and points out the core areas that should be focused in the future. Special attention is paid to the recent trends on knowledge sharing and troubleshooting tools; with potential research on technical diagnosis being enumerated.
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    Perspectives on the commercial development of landing gear health monitoring systems
    (Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam., 2011-12-31T00:00:00Z) Phillips, Paul; Diston, Dominic; Starr, Andrew G.
    The development of health monitoring technologies for aerospace systems creates a number of challenges for the community of engineers and technical specialists as they seek to integrate the technology into well defined working practices. These challenges do not just extend to the technical, but require a number of commercial questions to be addressed. It is of vital importance, that there is a clearly identified need for aerospace health monitoring, both from a technological and commercial viewpoint. If these needs cannot be identified, then any attempt for marketing health monitoring as a necessary future technological requirement is doomed for failure. Health monitoring technology will need to either deliver significant cost saving benefits to the aircraft operator or demonstrated increases in aircraft safety. The objective of the paper is to provide an assessment of the commercial benefits and development of aircraft landing gear health monitoring. The commercial need and challenges for health monitoring systems are explored in this paper within the context of a changing aerospace maintenance industry and the role in which new systems technology will play. The key findings of the research study are that within the aerospace industry there is a desired paradigm shift within aircraft maintenance towards offering maintenance systems with predictive capabilities. This maintenance revolution will not just incorporate new technologies, but will result in aircraft maintenance packages tailored towards individual customer requirements. The study illustrates the state-of-the-art in health monitoring currently restricts aerospace integration and a number of key technical and commercial issues need to be addressed. Predictive health monitoring offers a variety of commercial benefits for maintenance providers, aircraft operators and manufacturers. However, in order for these benefits to be realised increased transparency in maintenance related information is required between these key players.