Economical and Reliable Methods of Processing HUMS Data for Maintenance Credits

This paper presents a description of economical and reliable methods for utilizing a Health and Usage Monitoring System to monitor the structural usage of rotorcraft during flight, report that usage in an error-free manner to a ground-based web server, and provide accumulated damage information back to the operator on a seven-day by twenty-four hour basis using the Internet. The benefits of these methods to rotorcraft operators are: to maintain, with greater confidence, the same "six-nines" of structural reliability as the long-established safe-life methodology; to modify retirement lives (and reduce component replacement costs) in those instances where usage is more benign than initially assumed; to reduce retirement lives (and enhance airworthiness) in those instances where usage is more severe than initially assumed; provide low cost and convenient daily feedback of fatigue damage to operators and pilots so corrective actions may be taken to reduce the rate of damage accumulation; and provide the ability to employ the latest available fatigue parameters in the recalculation of retirement times of components in service.