Designing for sustainability & upgradability in an aerospace system

The United States Air Force utilizes a significant amount of its budget to maintain its aerospace systems in operational condition. In order to reduce these costs, the Air Force has communicated to aerospace manufactures a desire to reduce the overall costs of its aerospace system maintenance. This thesis investigates how the Air Force and Corporation Alpha, a leading manufacturer of aerospace engines, have adapted their design and development practices to make the EG10 fighter engine family more reliable, durable, and maintainable. I used the metric Unscheduled Engine Removals (UER) per 1000 Effective Flight Hours (UER/1000EFH) to compare the sustainability of different models of EG10 while investigating how the sustainment lessons of the EG10 have been incorporated into Corporation Alpha's latest product, the EG1 5-1. The analysis presented in this thesis will focus on the policies, technology, processes and tools, and final results of efforts to improve the sustainability of these engine systems. The final results show that the sustainability, as measured by the UER metric, have not increased beyond 106 EFH with each succeeding generation of EG10 engine. This illustrates that improving aerospace system sustainability involves factors beyond the design phase of the system.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Lewis, Spencer L. (Spencer Lawrence), 1975-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wesley L. Harris and Daniel E. Hastings.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.
• Management of Technology Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://theses.mit.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/0018.mit.theses%2f2000-117
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://theses.mit.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/0018.mit.theses%2f2000-117

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9256