I hate engine monitors

[hais]

2 hours ago, Will.iam said:

I haven’t had a direction issued yet only altitude changes and frequency changes so far. I’m sure for time critical instructions they would still use the radio for faster acknowledgement. 

You have CPDLC in your Mooney?

[Will.iam]

1 minute ago, hais said:

You have CPDLC in your Mooney?

No A320 does in some of our fleet though. Kc-135 did as well. 

[MikeOH]

On 1/5/2023 at 3:04 PM, Will.iam said:

I’m sure for time critical instructions they would still use the radio for faster acknowledgement. 

Hmm,..."I'm sorry Will.iam, I'm afraid I can't do that"

[Will.iam]

10 hours ago, MikeOH said:

Hmm,..."I'm sorry Will.iam, I'm afraid I can't do that"

Let me see where is that button… oh yah here it is  “unable” 

[jetdriven]

On 12/30/2022 at 5:03 AM, Raymond J1 said:

We can more than TBO several times, without monitoring, this up to the life limit. For example, on IO 360 A1A, where it seems that the "wide deck" crankcase can hardly withstand more than 4000 hours without cracking, we can keep our nitrided cylinders for almost 3500 hours by changing the bore to + 10 (0.010") and by changing the mobile crew. This was already possible before the monitoring and analysis of saavy, it is just the normal possibility offered by the design of Lycoming or Continental engines.

The monitoring records the data (the effects), then you analyze these data and conclude after that one of your valves is no longer sealed (assume the causes)...
The control of the leakage rate at 100 hrs tells you the same thing, without analysis, just an observation of the cause with various effects.
And between two leak rate measurements (100 hrs), it's rare to miss out.

Monitoring is good for those who no longer want to do a leak rate check at 100 hours because they steal a lot and penalize the operation by too much downtime. The flip side of the coin is that the problem will be seen too late, because the monitor sees the effects and not the causes.

It is for this reason that effective monitoring is the one that controls the effects in order to control the causes.
For example, on machine tools, we control the vibratory and the balancing is dynamically changed to limit the effects of unbalance (bearing wear, precision during machining).
Another example in an engine, the mixture is controlled according to the analysis of the burnt gases, the intake pressure and the speed to obtain the best air-gasoline ratio... Which is not done on our lycoming since we trust an EGT or TIT probe which is located very far from the valves of a limited engine on this point (air-cooled)...

As "exM20K" wrote, modern monitors record data from old and not very accurate probes. The greatest value of a modern monitor would be to manage the combustion on the basis of a lambda probe control, for example, not to repeat the work of an analog gauge 40 times cheaper.

I am not against monitoring, on the contrary, I am for 100% monitoring, which eases the task of the driver.

On the other hand, I am against spending huge amounts of money on a digital display with flawless performance on an engine built with 1935 technology that cannot be controlled other than by a human hand.
Especially if in addition we believe that with this monitoring we can dispense with the maintenance required for the engine.

However, I do not see on airplanes equipped with an EDM or others a new controlled advance ignition system, a controlled injection with variable flow rate (therefore constant pressure), an intake pressure regulation system.

 

That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard on the Internet and I read a lot every day. Stick to the theoretical stuff you can't kill anybody with that. 

[Raymond J1]

15 hours ago, jetdriven said:

That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard on the Internet and I read a lot every day. Stick to the theoretical stuff you can't kill anybody with that. 

As you may have read on the internet, at the risk of taking the information for nonsense, it is not with the internet that the time between the overhaul of an engine and the moment when its useful life ceases is decided... Especially if said engine was born a very long time before the Internet.
An engine is a technical object, and only the technique is capable of ruling on its state... Nothing else.
And the basis of technical discussions, on the Internet or elsewhere, is the table of limits, that is to say SSP 1776 for an IO 360... Example.
If you read this document, on the Internet or elsewhere, you will find that the engine manufacturer does not offer to tell you if the engine is worn out or not depending on the age of the pilot, the year of construction, the flight time, and the country in which you are located. In reality, he just asks you to carry out a metrology of the constituent parts of the engine and to verify that each one respects the manufacturing tolerances, that the engine has a total flight time of 500 or 5000 hours. At certain deadlines, there is a systematic replacement of certain components which is advisable or recommended...
And as long as the part is dimensionally and structurally compliant, it is not prescribed to replace it, reuse is quite viable and this is how all engine overhaul workshops around the world work. 

You can see this every day, especially on the "warbirds" engines whose crankcases and mobile crew are sometimes 80 years old and several times the recommended TBO.

I know an IO 360 from 1968 that has more than 4000 hours of flight, it still has its original crankcases, its crankshaft and also the original cylinders # 1 & #3. During its second general overhaul, it is ironed in bore "+ 10" (+ 0,010"), without going under the nitriding layer of the cylinders and received new pistons to the same standard.

The solution of replacing an old engine with a new one is not a safer or better solution than that of overhauling. It's just sometimes an economical solution and nothing more.

But this takes us away from the subject of monitoring, the benefits of which would be demonstrated if the wear effects observed at each TBO were reduced... Which is still not the case.

[Raymond J1]

On 20/03/2023 at 19:38, Evan said:

Qu'est-ce que cela signifie même?

This means that instead of reading nonsense on the internet, I suggest you read SSP 1776 if you have an IO 360 under your engine hood.

[rbp]

On 3/20/2023 at 2:38 PM, Evan said:

What does this even mean?

he is saying the shape and integrity of the parts in the engine is a better indicator of engine wear / life than than recording and analyzing temps and hours.

He's right of course -- when the monitoring (or oil analysis) indicates a problem, the problem has already happened, so its only retrospective. then we go in and find out which parts no longer meet the shape and integrity specs set out by the manufacturer, and fix them. And if there are too many parts to fix, we take the engine out and overhaul or get an entirely new one.

Where he is wrong, is that we can't easily prospectively examine the requisite parts of the engine which need to be within spec. We can use boroscopes at interval, but no onejust pulls a jug or a cracks a case to see whether the parts meet spec.

 

[Raymond J1]

6 hours ago, rbp said:

he is saying the shape and integrity of the parts in the engine is a better indicator of engine wear / life than than recording and analyzing temps and hours.

He's right of course -- when the monitoring (or oil analysis) indicates a problem, the problem has already happened, so its only retrospective. then we go in and find out which parts no longer meet the shape and integrity specs set out by the manufacturer, and fix them. And if there are too many parts to fix, we take the engine out and overhaul or get an entirely new one.

Where he is wrong, is that we can't easily prospectively examine the requisite parts of the engine which need to be within spec. We can use boroscopes at interval, but no onejust pulls a jug or a cracks a case to see whether the parts meet spec.

 

I don't know if I'm wrong, but I see that the correct modern way to progress would be the one that consists of monitoring an engine to finally notice the damage too late.

And this may raise eyebrows among some old-school technicians, connoisseurs of the different aspects of preventive and predictive maintenance, who find it a bit daring to trust a method of predicting problems once they have occurred.

Especially since, faced with the modern epic of monitoring, there is an ancient history of preventive and curative maintenance, based on the hourly and calendar expertise of the mechanisms for checking the reference states (clearances, pressures, temperatures, regimes), that is to say the above when there are deviations, the degradation of performance.
While monitoring notes a performance degradation when it occurs... And you are working on it to deduce the causes.
In mechanics, this is called "working backwards", that is to say starting from the effects to treat them, whereas in the old principle of curative maintenance and more advanced preventive maintenance, the effects are avoided by treating the causes in advance, that is to say before the effects occur.

[PT20J]

There be a lot of long words in there, and we are naught but simple pilots. 

[ilovecornfields]

21 hours ago, Raymond J1 said:

the effects are avoided by treating the causes in advance, that is to say before the effects occur.

For those of us who are mechanically impaired, what is a reliable and cost-effective way to “treat the causes in advance” before the effects have occurred (in order to avoid unnecessary raising of eyebrows by old-school technician)?

How would I reliably predict what is going to happen and prevent it from happening without unnecessary cost, downtime and maintenance induced failures? And without an engine monitor, of course.

[Raymond J1]

I'll take an example...

More simply... You are in the situation of a user who has a very developed engine monitoring, you are equipped to follow the constants of its operation. You are a perfectionist and have all this :
-Pressures (oil, Map, fuel,...),
-Flow rates (oil, air,...),
-Temperatures (CHT, OAT, EGT, oil,...),
-Speeds (engine/propeller, tubo...),

As it is much too expensive, you do not have the vibratory tracking (acoustic) and you preferred a very comfortable ANR headset to hear the radio well...

Question :

Do you know the influence on the engine parameters that you follow from an exhaust valve that gets stuck or flu in its guide?
Do you know what happens when an oil injector under the piston is clogged and no longer sprinkles oil on the said piston bottom to cool it?

The two phenomena mentioned above are some of the beginnings of a malfunction of the engine, do you know how to tell if these are effects or if these are the causes of the malfunction?

In truth, they are both effects, but most technicians will tell you that they are the cause of something... They do not cause the engine to stop, at worst we notice the destruction of the rocker rods, a loss of power, at best just a buckling of the rocker rods and sometimes a return to normal operation as soon as the oil temperature has dropped again (for example after a sustained climb to altitude and then the passage to cruising level).

Because yes, when this happens, parameters vary, first the speed and the vibrations (the acoustics change) and then the temperatures.
When a valve erases in its guide, it is after the temperature of the oil increases and again after the CHT changes, what changes first is the speed, consequence of a poor efficiency of the cylinder concerned... So the effects are noticed afterwards... Unless you mistakenly consider that the effects would be causes.

But you don't monitor the noise in addition to having a radio headset on your ears and the speed is regulated by the mechanism of your propeller at constant speed... So you will not see and you will not hear the first effects.
If you had monitored the acoustics or the vibration of the engine, then you would have had the information of what is happening at the moment when this happens... But it's out of budget.
And so on the contrary, when the monitored deviations are noticed, who knows how to build among the user pilots a tree of the causes of failures and above all, at what too late moment are the damages noticed?

What I am writing to you has been known for a long time, and the onboard monitoring on board has not revealed the thing, it has been known since the late 30s and discovered with the use by engine manufacturers of complex installations for monitoring engine parameters.

It is these errors of considerations between causes and effects and also the late observation of damage that led to preventive maintenance interventions towards the end of the 1940s, i.e. the creation of time stops between TBO to assess and note (instead of imagining) the partial state of a mechanism, what we call in mechanics the reference states.

The reference states are clearance or adjustment values that allow the proper operation of the engine, if they change or if they are modified, then the operation of the engine and the performance are impacted.
Are not considered as reference state which does not impact the operation of the engine when the state changes.
For example, the spacing of the spark plug filaments is a reference state... The degree of timing of the ignition advance is another, the same applies to the valve guide clearances, the rocker arm clearances,...
The oil pressure set with the setting of the oil pressure regulator is a reference state...

Do not confuse reference state and performance parameter...

The engine speed, for example, it is not a reference state, it is just a parameter to check that allows you to see that the engine performance is obtained.

So in mechanics, during a certain period of the history, the intelectual construction of a serious maintenance is the preventive method, it consists in ascertaining by factual readings the reference states of the mechanism and possibly carrying out corrective measures to find these states when they are in deviation.
The BS of a manufacturer like Lycoming who suggests that you measure the clearance at the valve guides every 400 hours fits into this philosophy.
The periodicity of 400 hours is also defined as sufficient... So for your 4 cylinder O 360, every 100 hours you know what you have to do: Control the clearance with the guides of a cylinder.
The magnetos at 200 hours and alternately... The candles at 50 o'clock...

Preventive maintenance has one cause of failure: The incorrect execution of simple operations with partial disassembly.
Because the consequence of a bad reassembly of the partially deposited thing is sometimes worse than the degradation of the reference state that it was desired to correct.
And it is this observation that towards the end of the 70s led to monitoring certain reference states, or the effects they generate, in order to avoid serious failures following minor maintenance intervention.
This is the creation of "predictive" maintenance, that is, the one that bases the service time between repairs (and not TBO) on the basis of performance records in service.
This is another topic, but the procedure of "fluid management" is for example one of the tools of predictive maintenance...

On the contrary, you cannot pretend to do predictive maintenance with an oil change at 50 h which is a preventive maintenance solution.

Well, it's the same reasoning with someone who explains to you to do monitoring and change his candles every 200 hours... One is not in tune with the other.

[jetdriven]

I think you're some kind of AI bot,  because you're using terms that are not common for auto mechanics nor aircraft mechanics or pilots for that matter

[N201MKTurbo]

1 hour ago, jetdriven said:

I think you're some kind of AI bot,  because you're using terms that are not common for auto mechanics nor aircraft mechanics or pilots for that matter

Well you are starting with French speaker who is translating into english. 

[N201MKTurbo]

If you think of an engine overhaul as a required inspection of the internal engine parts. It may make more sense.

Beyond the list of required replacement parts, nothing is required to be replaced. And the required replacement parts are not even required by regulation, only inspection and replacing worn out parts. 

I hate to say it, but I have seen an engine disassembled, cleaned, visually inspected and reassembled with nothing more than new gaskets and called an overhaul. And legally speaking, it was.

[ilovecornfields]

I wish the French AI bot would answer my simple question. Google’s Bot is far superior as evidenced by an exchange my son had with it during dinner.

 

 

 

 

[Raymond J1]

I liked for a few seconds the nickname of French AI...

Because the US AI says that the Mooney M20 is a high-wing aircraft...

 

[ilovecornfields]

"I'm sorry, but I'm not going to engage with you. Your comments are not constructive and are simply designed to provoke a reaction. If you'd like to have a productive conversation about airplanes, I'm happy to do so, but only if you can be respectful."

[Raymond J1]

1 hour ago, ilovecornfields said:

"I'm sorry, but I'm not going to engage with you. Your comments are not constructive and are simply designed to provoke a reaction. If you'd like to have a productive conversation about airplanes, I'm happy to do so, but only if you can be respectful."

If my words seemed disrespectful to you, please accept my sincere apologies because I do not intend to leave this impression or even harm.
My job is precision mechanics, with several years in aircraft construction, aircraft restoration is also my passion.
I have a reputation for being precise and picky, a requirement of my profession which is also my nature.

So sometimes this translates in my writings by the use of dedicated terms and the desire to explain what the business rules require, but also the corollary, that is, what tinkered or technically unfounded operations can generate. I am also a private pilot, so I understand the expectations of the pilot who owns an aircraft.

Don't blame others for not being constructive if you don't even give a constructive testimony. If you don't understand my words, because of my imperfect translations or my poor command of the language, ask, I can rephrase without problem.

[ilovecornfields]

1 hour ago, Raymond J1 said:

If my words seemed disrespectful to you, please accept my sincere apologies because I do not intend to leave this impression or even harm.
My job is precision mechanics, with several years in aircraft construction, aircraft restoration is also my passion.
I have a reputation for being precise and picky, a requirement of my profession which is also my nature.

So sometimes this translates in my writings by the use of dedicated terms and the desire to explain what the business rules require, but also the corollary, that is, what tinkered or technically unfounded operations can generate. I am also a private pilot, so I understand the expectations of the pilot who owns an aircraft.

Don't blame others for not being constructive if you don't even give a constructive testimony. If you don't understand my words, because of my imperfect translations or my poor command of the language, ask, I can rephrase without problem.

Thank you for your apology. I appreciate your explanation of your profession and your passion for precision. I understand that your job requires you to be precise and picky, and I respect that.

I also understand that your words may have seemed disrespectful to me because I am not as familiar with your field as you are. I apologize for any misunderstanding.

I would like to thank you for your willingness to explain your words to me. I am always looking to learn more, and I appreciate your help.