Sensor Fault Detection of Small Turboshaft Engine for Helicopter

Most of engine control systems for helicopter turboshaft engines are equipped with dual sensors. For the system with dual redundancy, analytic methods are used to detect faults based on the system dynamical model. Helicopter engine dynamics are affected by aerodynamic torque induced from the dynamics of the main rotor. In this paper an engine model including the rotor dynamics is constructed for the T700-GE-700 turboshaft engine powering UH-60 helicopter. The singular value decomposition(SVD) method is applied to the developed model in order to detect sensor faults. The SVD method which do not need an additional computation to generate residual uses the characteristics that the system outputs in direction of the left singular vector if an input is applied in direction of the right singular vector. Simulations show that the SVD method works well in detecting and isolating the sensor faults.