Towards a Usage Driven Maintenance Concept: Improving Maintenance Value

For critical airline components, design and failure data is not released by the manufacturer, and the maintenance execution of these components is mandated, planned and executed by the manufacturer. This yields maintenance practices identical for all systems within the fleet, independent of the historical usage of the operator. And since the design spectrum is not validated towards the actual usage spectrum, this will result in too early replacements of components which in turn increase life-cycle maintenance costs and reduce overall availability. In this research, a usage severity driven maintenance framework is proposed, which zooms in at the actual failure mechanisms applied on the component and then calculates its service live based on the loads acting on the component under several circumstances. For the Chinook T-55 engine, this maintenance strategy reduces life-cycle maintenance costs with 20 % while availability has increased.