Super Stallions get 'user friendly'
Marine Corps News
Story Identification #: 20052117511
Story by Naval Air Systems Command
NAVAIR PATUXENT RIVER, MD. (fEB. 8, 2005) -- Thanks to a few Marines, engineers and logisticians here and at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., naval aviation’s most maintenance-hungry bird is about to get downright user friendly.
Set to enter full-rate production and fleet-wide introduction, the Integrated Mechanical Diagnostic System recently passed its operational evaluation at Cherry Point will soon improve CH-53E flight safety and simplify maintenance.
“IMDS will take Big Iron maintainers somewhere they’ve never been before,” explained NAVAIR’s Col. Paul Croisetiere, the program manager for H-53 heavy lift helicopters here. “Home for dinner.”
Manufactured by Goodrich Corporation, Fuel and Utility Systems of Vergennes, Vermont, IMDS is the first fully integrated multi-functional health and usage monitoring system to be fielded on Navy and USMC helicopters, according to Rich Tullos, H-53 program engineer. IMDS applies full-time diagnostic monitoring to the entire H-53 mechanical drive train – from engines to rotor system.
Physically installed on the aircraft and integrated with the onboard systems and mission computer, the new system automatically performs a variety of functions currently done with separate test equipment, manual data collection and labor-intensive (and time consuming) maintenance troubleshooting.
“The biggest money-maker for the H 53 is going to be the IMDS rotor track and balance capability,” said Maj. Hank Vanderborght, H-53 project pilot at the Rotary Wing Test Squadron here. “The H-53’s seven-blade main rotor system takes a lot of effort for track and balance, both in terms of maintenance adjustments and functional check flight to verify the adjustments. IMDS collects that information on each flight and offers adjustments to minimize rotor vibration.
“IMDS has let us balance the rotor head many times with a single set of adjustments,” he added. “That’s significantly less work for our maintainers and a much smoother ride for everyone onboard.”
With such a complex rotor head, three engines, a massive transmission and gearboxes driving a tail rotor bigger than some other helicopters’ main rotor, the Marines’ heavy lifter also requires a lot of checking, calibrating and fixing of its powerful, and constantly vibrating, drive train.
“There are more than 40 vibration sensors on components that we want to monitor throughout the aircraft,” said Eric Schwartz, H-53 systems engineer. “The system is capturing data all the time, and the software has been trained to recognize significant changes that suggest that a component could be failing. Depending on its criticality, we can take some immediate action, or we can flag that component for inspection and maintenance at a more opportune time.”
In addition to helping maintainers diagnose mechanical issues, IMDS also automates some of the previous manual inspections and record keeping.
“Flight time and engine operating time are two examples of operational usage data that IMDS automatically records,” explained Mark Bailer, the deputy program manager here for in-service H-53s and IMDS integrated product team leader. “IMDS records usage data more consistently and accurately and relieves the crew of these bookkeeping chores. It will also step through the engine power assurance checks and eliminates the need to go into charts and tables confirm that an engine is healthy.”
Data collected in-flight by IMDS is recorded on a standard PCMCIA memory card, which the crew downloads into a server after a flight to highlight anything needing maintenance attention.
“Before IMDS, we did it the hard way,” explained Croisetiere. “We did phase maintenance to check components manually on a regular schedule, which is very time consuming, or we replaced components when they failed, which is expensive, inefficient and also time consuming. With IMDS, the long-range goal is to fix things when we actually need to – the components will tell us when they need attention.
“That’s a huge shift,” Croisetiere added.
Naval aviation’s senior tester agreed in his IMDS operational evaluation report, calling IMDS a “welcome enhancement” for improving vibration reduction-related maintenance functions.
“IMDS is on the right track for the long range benefits of decreased scheduled maintenance and on-condition maintenance repair/inspection of components,” said Rear Adm. David Architzel , commander of the Operational Test and Evaluation Force. “IMDS is operationally effective and suitable, and recommended for fleet introduction in the CH-53E.”
The H-53 IMDS is in low-rate initial production and is being installed on HMT-302 aircraft at MCAS New River, North Carolina. The system is also under consideration for installation in MH-60 and H-1 helicopters.
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