Determining preventive maintenance interval to increase the reliability of air turbine engine starter

• Main Authors: Nursanti, Ellysa, Sibut, Sibut, Prijohutomo, Sunarjono
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aircraft; Aircraft maintenance; Aircraft reliability; Ball bearings; Component reliability; Coupling; Engine starters; Fault tree analysis; Gear trains; Malfunctions; Mean time to failure; Preventive maintenance; System reliability; Turbine engines; Turbines
• ISSN: 0094-243X; 1551-7616
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0203228

Air turbine engine starter has been used to start the engine in an aircraft, in this case Hercules type C-130. In many cases of flight missions, aircraft could be failed to start due to component malfunctions inside the air turbine engine starter system. Therefore, this study is needed to guarantee that reliability of the system in a good condition. This research will determine the optimum preventive maintenance interval which could increase the reliability of the aircraft system. Fault Tree Analysis is being used to investigate the relationship between components in the system, so that the malfunction components that may cause system failure can be detected earlier. By using parameter of Mean Time to Failure (MTTF), it is found that these following components are critical i.e., Pinion Gear, Jaw Coupling, Output Shaft, and also Turbine Rotor. As the result, it is found that Planetary Gear Retainer is the most critical one MTTF at 1626 hours. The 2nd rank is Thrust Plate at 1629 hours then Jaw Coupling at 1674 hours followed by Planetary Gear at 1768 hours then Pinion Gear at 1867 hours, Inner-Outer Plate at 2003 hours and the last is Ball Bearing at 1957 hours. To maintain optimum system reliability at R=0.95, then the system should be maintained every 1589 hours periodically and may become shorter when failure has been detected earlier.