Aircraft Heat Exchanger Fault Detection Model Based on Extended Kalman Filter

Heat exchangers are crucial components of aircraft air management systems, primarily responsible for cooling high-temperature engine bleed air and providing air at the appropriate temperature for downstream gas systems. Failures in heat exchangers can reduce heat transfer efficiency, affect the performance of air management systems, and in severe cases, even lead to catastrophic accidents for aircraft. This paper proposes a nonlinear dynamic thermodynamic physical model of the heat exchanger, which, based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), can estimate model parameters when the inlet and outlet temperatures and mass flow rates of the heat exchanger are known. Additionally, bench tests of a clean heat exchanger were conducted in the laboratory, and the test data were used to optimize the Extended Kalman Filter. The results show that the optimized model has high sensitivity and robustness, making it suitable for fault detection in aircraft heat exchangers.