Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Liquid Propulsion Rocket Engine Combustion Chamber

The reusability of a liquid propulsion rocket engine (LPRE) has gained tremendous attention in the recent years. The present paper deals with an automatic estimation of the Remaining Useful Life of a LPRE combustion chamber with the cracking of the internal wall due to the thermo-mechanical stress considered as one of the major degradation modes. The study is performed using simulated data generated by a fictive LPRE engine model and the approach developed in this work is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. A hybrid approach is proposed for the failure prognostics by fusing the knowledge brought in by an approximately correct degradation model with actual sensor measurements. The RUL prediction is made with respect to a failure threshold set by the user. The study considers two kinds of missions: flight and ground missions. The results indicate the effectiveness of the approach under single as well as variable operating condition for LPREs.