Organizational Unit:
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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Integrated Sizing and Multi-objective Optimization of Aircraft and Subsystem Architectures in Early Design

2017-06 , Rajaram, Dushhyanth , Cai, Yu , Chakraborty, Imon , Puranik, Tejas G. , Mavris, Dimitri N.

The aerospace industry's current trend towards novel or More Electric architectures results in some unique challenges for designers due to both a scarcity or absence of historical data and a potentially large combinatorial space of possible architectures. These add to the already existing challenges of attempting to optimize an aircraft design in the presence of multiple possible objective functions while avoiding an overly compartmentalized approach. This paper uses the Integrated Subsystem Sizing and Architecture Assessment Capability to pursue a multi-objective optimization for a Large Twin-aisle Aircraft and a Small Single-aisle Aircraft using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II with parallel function evaluations. One novelty of the optimization setup is that it explicitly considers the impacts of subsystem architectures in addition to those of traditional aircraft-level design variables. The optimization yielded generations of non-dominated designs in which substantially electrified subsystem architectures were found to predominate. As a first assessment of the impact of epistemic uncertainty on the results obtained, the optimization was re-run with altered sensitivities for the thrust-specific fuel consumption penalties due to shaft-power and bleed air extraction. This analysis demonstrated that the composition of architectures on the Pareto frontier is sensitive to the secondary power extraction penalties, but more so for the Small Single-aisle Aircraft than the Large Twin-aisle Aircraft.

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Anomaly Detection in General Aviation Operations Using Energy Metrics and Flight Data Records

2017 , Puranik, Tejas G. , Mavris, Dimitri N.

Among operations in the General Aviation community, one of the most important objectives is to improve safety across all flight regimes. Flight data monitoring or Flight Operations Quality Assurance programs have percolated in the General Aviation sector with the aim of improving safety by analyzing and evaluating flight data. Energy-based metrics provide measurable indications of the energy state of the aircraft and can be viewed as an objective currency to evaluate various safety-critical conditions. The use of data mining techniques for safety analysis, incident examination, and fault detection is gaining traction in the aviation community. In this paper, a generic methodology is presented for identifying anomalous flight data records from General Aviation operations in the approach and landing phase. Energy based metrics, identified in previous work, are used to generate feature vectors for each flight data record. Density-based clustering and one-class classification are then used together for anomaly detection using energy-based metrics. A demonstration of this methodology on a set of actual flight data records from routine operations as well as simulated flight data is presented highlighting its potential for retrospective safety analysis. Anomaly detection using energy metrics, specifically, is a novel application presented here.

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Identifying Instantaneous Anomalies in General Aviation Operations

2017-06 , Mavris, Dimitri N. , Puranik, Tejas G.

Quantification and improvement of safety is one of the most important objectives among the General Aviation community. In recent years, data mining techniques are emerging as an important enabler in the aviation safety domain with a number of techniques being applied to flight data to identify and isolate anomalous (and potentially unsafe) operations. There are two types of anomalies typically identified - flight-level (where the entire flight exhibits patterns deviating from nominal operations) and instantaneous (where a subset or few instants of the flight deviate significantly from nominal operations). Energy-based metrics provide measurable indications of the energy state of the aircraft and can be viewed as an objective currency to evaluate various safety-critical conditions across a heterogeneous fleet of aircraft. In this paper, a novel method of identifying instantaneous anomalies for retrospective safety analysis using energy-based metrics is proposed. Each data record is split by sliding a moving window across the multi-variate series of evaluated energy metrics. A mixture of gaussian models is then used to perform clustering using the values of energy metrics and their variability within each window. The trained models are then used to identify anomalies that may indicate increased levels of risk. The identified anomalies are compared with traditional methods of safety assessment (exceedance detection).

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Utilizing Energy Metrics and Clustering Techniques to Identify Anomalous General Aviation Operations

2017-01 , Puranik, Tejas G. , Jimenez, Hernando , Mavris, Dimitri N.

Among operations in the General Aviation community, one of the most important objectives is to improve safety across all flight regimes. Flight data monitoring or Flight Operations Quality Assurance programs have percolated in the General Aviation sector with the aim of improving safety by analyzing and evaluating flight data. Energy-based metrics provide measurable indications of the energy state of the aircraft and can be viewed as an objective currency to evaluate various safety-critical conditions. The use of data mining techniques for safety analysis, incident examination, and fault detection is gaining traction in the aviation community. In this paper, we have presented a generic methodology for identifying anomalous flight data records from General Aviation operations using energy based metrics and clustering techniques. The sensitivity of this methodology to various key parameters is quantified using different experiments. A demonstration of this methodology on a set of actual flight data records as well as simulated flight data is presented highlighting its future potential.