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Originally Posted by Jake Raby
Finally we have created a method of forecasting impending IMS failure prior to a big boom. It will also cause some animosity and drama, but it will also help save engines for those who do not want to electively retrofit their IMS bearing. We are in the process of the trademark and patenting procedures and are aggressively doing these things to get the product on the market ASAP because engines are dying daily that we could save.
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Interesting, here is what I've been up to....
The vibration level in aircraft engines is monitored continuously and when the vibe level changes in a characteristic manner they know that a failure is imminent - before it actually happens. Simiarly, I am quite confident that there are vibration characteristics that occur as the IMS bearing progressively fails.
This is common aerospace technology and I've been running a vibe sensor on my engine for 2 months. Of course, my engine is running fine so the vibration levels and frequency content always looks the same.
The hard part is getting enough data to characterize the vibration characteristics that occur before the failure goes boom. Aircraft comanies opbtain this data during the engine development process and furthremore they have the money to instrument hundereds of aircraft and then record all of the data and analyze it as the failures start to occur.
I have considered creating a kit to install on customer cars to obtain a wide variety of data sets in the hopes of obtaining some crucial failure data but with failure rates running less than 10% (and maybe less than 5%), I'd have to instrument a LOT of cars to get the data that is needed in any reasonable amount of time.
Of course, an alternative is using a test engine(s) and forcing failures to get the vibe data that characterizes the coming failure. The problem with forcing an engine failure is ensuring that the forced failure completely and fully represents the same type of failure and mode that might happen in the field. Otherwise, all you've done is create a method to detect a failure mode that never occurs in the field.
The ultimate idea, once all of this is sorted out, is that I'll sell a kit to customers that records the vibe data. The customer will upload the vibe data every so often over the internet to my server which will anayze it and tell the customer if a failure might be coming. All remotely.
I'm still early in the process and busy with a lot of other projects so this one is moving pretty slowly but these are my thoughts.