UWE Bristol Engineering showcase 2015
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Peter Batchelor<br />
<strong>Engineering</strong> BSc(Hons)<br />
Project Supervisor<br />
Dr Steve Wright<br />
An Analysis of an Airbus A320 Fuel Management System<br />
Introduction<br />
This project was to initially study aircraft-level reliability of the Airbus A320 fuel management system. Failure rate information for the<br />
components of the system could not be obtained, so the aim changed to analyse which sub-systems and components have the largest<br />
effect on overall system reliability. It uses industry software, Isograph Reliability Workbench, to design and analyse fault trees.<br />
The Fuel Management System<br />
The FMS has several tasks:<br />
• To constantly keep the engines fed with fuel.<br />
• To ensure the condition of the fuel.<br />
• To distribute fuel to the desired tanks during refuelling.<br />
• To allow the fuel to be removed during a defuel.<br />
This study focused on the critical failure of the FMS, that it stopped supplying<br />
fuel to the engines.<br />
Project summary<br />
To perform fault tree analysis of an Airbus<br />
A320’s Fuel Management System using<br />
industry tools to pin point sub-systems with<br />
the largest effect on overall system reliability.<br />
Project Objectives<br />
• Specify the Fuel Management System<br />
• Construct fault tree design<br />
• Build the fault tree and analyse outputs<br />
• Research failure rate information<br />
• Investigate fault tree software<br />
Fault Tree Design<br />
A fault tree comprises of a top gate,<br />
with other events of gates feeding<br />
into it. These gates act as logical<br />
operators, manipulating the failure<br />
rate information and providing an<br />
overall failure rate for the system at<br />
the top as well as sub-system failure<br />
rates from secondary gates. The<br />
bottom of each tree are events.<br />
These take in failure rate numbers.<br />
Analysis<br />
Data was gather from various sources and inputted into the<br />
model. The output top gate figure was close to the predicted<br />
overall failure rate, which helped prove the model was<br />
viable. Analysis showed that the main failure point was<br />
technician error in filling the pipe connectors, although<br />
other systems stopped this from impacting overall reliability.<br />
Project Conclusion<br />
• That even without specific failure rate<br />
information, fault trees allow analysis of<br />
systems to pinpoint hot spots of failure<br />
easily and effectively and allow new<br />
designs to be implemented and tested.<br />
• Specific failure rate information for<br />
components is nearly impossible to obtain.<br />
• Isograph Reliability Workbench and<br />
FaultTree+ are good software allowing a<br />
high degree of analysis but have poor<br />
interfaces.
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