System and method for rotor blade health monitoring

A system comprising:

• time of arrival (TOA) sensors;
• and
• a controller comprising
• a sensor level fuser configured for obtaining TOA signals indicative of times of arrival of the rotating rotor blades and fusing the TOAs signals for obtaining combined features;
• and
• a processor configured for fusing times of arrival signals obtained from the time of arrival sensors and the combined features from the sensor level fuser for use in evaluating health of the rotating rotor blades.

A system comprising:

• time of arrival (TOA) sensors;
• and
• a controller comprising
• a processor for obtaining TOA signals indicative of times of arrival of rotating rotor blades from the respective TOA sensors and for determining, from the TOA signals, initial features for use in evaluating the health of the rotating rotor blades;
• a sensor level fuser for obtaining combined features by fusing data obtained from the TOA sensors,
• a feature level fuser for fusing the times of arrival signals from the time of arrival sensors and the combined features,
• a physics modeler for receiving the initial features from the processor and estimating data regarding rotor blade crack length and rotor blade crack propagation time,
• a reliability modeler for estimating data regarding probability of the rotor blade crack, and
• a decision level fuser for fusing data received from the feature level fuser, the physics modeler, and the reliability modeler, for determining the health of the rotating rotor blades from the fused data.

A method comprising:

• determining a time of arrival (TOA) and operational parameters of rotating rotor blades;
• determining a delta TOA using the TOA and a predetermined TOA;
• determining a corrected delta TOA by normalizing the delta TOA for variations in the operational parameters of the rotating rotor blades;
• obtaining initial features from the corrected delta TOA;
• and
• obtaining crack length and crack propagation time of the rotating rotor blades by fusing the initial features and the operational parameters.