Damiano Paniccia

Damiano Paniccia, Francesco Aldo Tucci, Joel Guerrero et al.

Rotorcraft engines are highly complex, nonlinear thermodynamic systems that operate under varying environmental and flight conditions. Simulating their dynamics is crucial for design, fault diagnostics, and deterioration control phases, and requires robust and reliable control systems to estimate engine performance throughout flight envelope. However, the development of detailed physical models of the engine based on numerical simulations is a very challenging task due to the complex and entangled physics driving the engine. In this scenario, data-driven machine-learning techniques are of great interest to the aircraft engine community, due to their ability to describe nonlinear systems' dynamic behavior and enable online performance estimation, achieving excellent results with accuracy competitive with the state of the art. In this work, we explore different Neural Network architectures to model the turboshaft engine of Leonardo's AW189P4 prototype, aiming to predict the engine torque. The models are trained on an extensive database of real flight tests featuring a variety of operational maneuvers performed under different flight conditions, providing a comprehensive representation of the engine's performance. To complement the neural network approach, we apply Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) to derive a low-dimensional dynamical model from the available data, describing the relationship between fuel flow and engine torque. The resulting model showcases SINDy's capability to recover the actual physics underlying the engine dynamics and demonstrates its potential for investigating more complex aspects of the engine. The results prove that data-driven engine models can exploit a wider range of parameters than standard transfer function-based approaches, enabling the use of trained schemes to simulate nonlinear effects in different engines and helicopters.

Aurelio Raffa Ugolini, Jessica Leoni, Valentina Breschi et al.

We present a novel Explainable methodology for Condition Monitoring, relying on healthy data only. Since faults are rare events, we propose to focus on learning the probability distribution of healthy observations only, and detect Anomalies at runtime. This objective is achieved via the definition of probabilistic measures of deviation from nominality, which allow to detect and anticipate faults. The Bayesian perspective underpinning our approach allows us to perform Uncertainty Quantification to inform decisions. At the same time, we provide descriptive tools to enhance the interpretability of the results, supporting the deployment of the proposed strategy also in safety-critical applications. The methodology is validated experimentally on two use cases: a publicly available benchmark for Predictive Maintenance, and a real-world Helicopter Transmission dataset collected over multiple years. In both applications, the method achieves competitive detection performance with respect to state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods.