Evaluation of aircraft auxiliary power unit near-field acoustics for condition monitoring

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the near-field acoustics of an aircraft auxiliary power unit (APU), based on experimental data acquired from an in-situ APU. The aim is to establish whether near-field acoustics can be implemented for online condition monitoring. The APU of Cranfield University’s demonstrator aircraft, a Boeing 737-400, has been instrumented to acquire acoustics (near-field and far-field) and vibration data in synchronization with aircraft state parameters under a wide range of operating conditions. The acquired data is first implemented to determine the efficacy of employing near-field / far-field microphones, and vibration sensors, to monitor the combustion noise and tonal frequency levels from the APU components. Subsequently, an evaluation of the broadband characteristics of the vibroacoustic data and its variations against APU states and performance parameters is conducted based on several categories of feature extraction techniques. The findings suggest that nearfield acoustics lacks the ability to capture the combustion noise process. In addition, the tonal frequencies are also lost due to the level of background noise, fluctuations in the APU speeds, and scattering effects. For the same reasons, the phase couplings occurring between the signals generated by the APU components cannot be detected using acoustic data. Nevertheless, the overall analysis substantiates that the near-field acoustic data can be used to predict the APU operating states and has the potential to be implemented for developing APU performance parameter estimation models to enable condition monitoring.