SMMART, the System for Mobile Maintenance Accessible in Real Time, is a research & development project launched under the auspices of the European Union in November 2005. Grouping 24 partners, it aims to reduce maintenance costs by the remote, real-time collection of engine operating data.

“SMMART is designed for today’s increasingly sophisticated vehicles, especially in aviation,” says project coordinator Jean-Louis Boucon. SAFRAN Group company Turbomeca initiated the project and is the linchpin, providing 5 million euros out of the total budget of 26 million euros. It is directly responsible for technical, administrative and financial management, and also participates in 10 of the 16 work packages.

“Our goal is to provide increasingly personalized service, keyed to each customer’s own engine operating environment,” explains Boucon. “Through SMMART, we will be able to connect our products directly to the central the information system, allowing us to automatically gather a large amount of data on the condition and life potential of each major assembly.” For the moment, this is performed manually, and takes a lot of time!

In the SMMART system, about 30 line replaceable units (LRU) are fitted with “tags”, in fact tiny electronic units capable of transmitting data. When the engine stops, these tags are interrogated automatically by a control unit that then transfers all information to Turbomeca’s servers.

“The technical conditions are severe,” admits Boucon. “These tags have to operate in a metallic, confined, complex and very hot environment. Despite these restrictions our aim is to achieve a per-unit cost that is low enough for it to be covered by the corresponding gains in maintenance productivity.”

SMMART has to address another critical issue: distributing this information worldwide, securely. Despite all these challenges, an operational system would provide enormous advantages, and ultimately far more refined management of flight-hours and maintenance cycles.

Following a successful Critical Design Review last April, initial demonstrations of SMMART using Turbomeca engines are scheduled for the first half of next year. The first operational application could come as early as 2010.