During the last decades, innovative aircraft health management systems have been receiving increasing interest from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and aircraft operators. Their implementation could lead to substantial benefits: drastic cuts in turnaround time, operation costs, and Life Cycle Costs (LCCs) as well as sharp increases in system availability, safety, and reliability. An interconnectivity step-up is hence needed to guarantee a seamless data transfer. In this paper, an integrated open-source solution for reliable data transmission and near real-time graphical visualization is proposed. After a comprehensive calibration and verification campaign performed on a test stand, the overall system has been successfully validated on structural data measured using a network of Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) mounted on a radio-controlled model aircraft. The result is an effective and robust system able to monitor near real-time critical parameters and health status of structures. With this system, the temperature and displacements of the structure can be displayed on a heat map arranged on a 3D model and visualized through a computer application on the ground. The proposed methodology can be applied to heterogeneous scenarios, ranging from maintenance planning activities to performance checks, providing an all-in-one solution for flight data management as well as other applications in the structural monitoring domain.

New “enlightened” and holistic maintenance strategies are shaping the industrial world from the inside, providing intelligent and focused solutions where high availability, reliability and safety are required. Maintenance planning and scheduling is an extremely daunting and multi-faceted task which involves competences from fairly different fields: customer support, quality, engineering, production, RAMS, cost estimation etc. In the aerospace sector, a significant percentage of Life Cycle Costs (LCCs) and, in particular, operating costs, are determined by Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) activities and the relative asset unavailability due to down-time or turn-around-time [1,2]. This is the reason why currently there is an ongoing intense effort in the research community and in the industry towards new maintenance strategies which could overcome the limitations of preventive maintenance thus streamlining operations, without jeopardizing mission safety. This research project is hence spot on and focuses on the development of optimized maintenance strategies, built around the system health status.

The well-balanced combination of high energy density and competitive cycle performance has established lithium-ion batteries as the technology of choice for Electric Vehicles (EVs) energy storage. Nevertheless, battery degradation continues to pose challenges to EV range, safety, and long-term reliability, making accurate estimation of their State of Health (SoH) crucial for efficient battery management, safety, and improved longevity. This paper addresses a compelling research question surrounding the possibility of developing a real-time, non-invasive, and efficient methodology for estimating lithium-ion battery SoH without battery removal, relying solely on voltage and current data. Our approach integrates the fitting abilities of Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) with the dynamic uncertainty propagation of Bayesian Filtering to provide accurate and robust online SoH estimation. By reconstructing the open-circuit voltage curve from real-time data, the MLE estimates battery capacity during discharge cycles, while Bayesian Filtering refines these estimates, accounting for uncertainties and variations. The methodology is validated using an available dataset from Stanford University, demonstrating its effectiveness in tracking battery degradation under driving profiles. The results indicate that the approach can reliably estimate battery SoH with mean absolute errors below 1%, confirming its suitability for scalable EV applications.

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) strategies are gaining increasingly more traction in almost every field of engineering, offering stakeholders advanced capabilities in system monitoring, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance. Primary flight control actuators are safety-critical elements within aircraft flight control systems (FCSs), and currently, they are mainly based on Electro-Hydraulic Actuators (EHAs) or Electro-Hydrostatic Actuators (EHSAs). Despite the widespread diffusion of PHM methodologies, the application of these technologies for EHAs is still somewhat limited, and the available information is often restricted to the industrial sector. To fill this gap, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art EHA PHM strategies for aerospace applications, as well as their limitations and further developments through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). An objective and clear methodology, combined with the use of attractive and informative graphics, guides the reader towards a thorough investigation of the state of the art, as well as the challenges in the field that limit a wider implementation. It is deemed that the information presented in this review will be useful for new researchers and industry engineers as it provides indications for conducting research in this specific and still not very investigated sector.

The deployment of electro-mechanical actuators plays an important role towards the adoption of the more electric aircraft (MEA) philosophy. On the other hand, a seamless substitution of EMAs, in place of more traditional hydraulic solutions, is still set back, due to the shortage of real-life and reliability data regarding their failure modes. One way to work around this problem is providing a capillary EMA prognostics and health management (PHM) system capable of recognizing failures before they actually undermine the ability of the safety-critical system to perform its functions. The aim of this work is the development of a model-based prognostic framework for PMSM-based EMAs leveraging a metaheuristic algorithm: the evolutionary (differential evolution (DE)) and swarm intelligence (particle swarm (PSO), grey wolf (GWO)) methods are considered. Several failures (dry friction, backlash, short circuit, eccentricity, and proportional gain) are simulated by a reference model, and then detected and identified by the envisioned prognostic method, which employs a low fidelity monitoring model. The paper findings are analysed, showing good results and proving that this strategy could be executed and integrated in more complex routines, supporting EMAs adoption, with positive impacts on system safety and reliability in the aerospace and industrial field.