Reliability Analysis of Critical Systems in A Fuel Booster Pump Using Advanced Simulation Techniques

The fuel booster pump is one of the most vulnerable physical assets in an operating engine due to the harsh environmental and operational conditions. However, because of its high structural complexity and extreme operational conditions, the reliability design of the fuel booster pump becomes especially difficult, particularly by means of experiments. Thus, to overcome such a problem, advanced simulation techniques have become adequate solutions for the reliability assessment and analysis of a fuel booster pump at the design stage. In this paper, by considering the effects of the uncertainties of multiple design parameters, fatigue life distributions of the four key components (which are the sealing bolt, spline shaft, graphite ring, and inducer, respectively) in a fuel booster pump were first predicted by PoF-based reliability simulations. Then, through further sensitivity analysis on each key component, the design parameters most sensitive to the component mean fatigue life were detected from a total of 25 candidate parameters. These parameters include the “nominal diameter” and “preload” for the sealing bolt, “major and minor diameters of the small spline” for the spline shaft, “inside diameter” for the graphite ring, and “fuel pressure on the blade front surface” for the inducer, respectively. These sensitivity results were found to be in good agreement with the results from the qualitative cause analysis on each key component.