Health Monitoring of Aviation Hydraulic Fluids Using Opto-Chemical Sensor Technologies

Passenger safety requires that in commercial airplanes hydraulic actuators be powered by fire-resistant hydraulic fluids. As a downside, such fluids are hygroscopic which means that these tend to accumulate humidity from the environment and that the dissolved humidity tends to produce acidity which can corrode all kinds of metallic components inside a hydraulic system. As such damage in safety-critical subsystems is hard to localize and expensive to repair, sensor technologies are required which allow the state of water contamination and fluid degradation to be routinely checked and necessary maintenance actions to be scheduled in a way that causes minimum flight interruptions. The paper reviews progress that has been made in developing such sensor systems and in commissioning these into practical flight operation. Sensor technologies that proved optimally adapted to this purpose are multi-channel non-dispersive (NDIR) systems working in the mid-infrared range. Additional options concern optical absorption sensors working in the near-infrared and visible ranges as well as fluorescence sensors.