Health & Usage Monitoring (HUMS)

From intercity buses to Air Force helicopters, our Health and Usage Monitoring (HUMS) hardware is used on more than 1,000 vehicles to pin-point faults before they become catastrophic failures. Machine health monitoring is critical to data acquisition and control applications in order to mitigate failures, detect performance issues, and avoid steep maintenance costs. Our systems provide actionable intelligence to allow for better informed maintenance decisions.

What makes UEI’s HUMS device unique?

• Runs embedded Linux or VxWorks for infinite operational possibilities.
• Flexible programming options that include C/C++, Simulink and more.
• Long term availability -- UEI's 10-Year Availability Guarantee
• Can be custom configured with a wide variety of I/O. Interchangeable I/O boards allow for UEI's HUMS devices to monitor just one or many different components of a device/system:

• Extremely high Analog and Digital channel counts
• ARINC 429, 708/453 WxPD
• MIL-STD-1553
• Serial and/or CANBus
• Excitation power for sensors
• Counter/Timers

Benefits of a Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS)

• Enhanced Safety
• A UEI HUMS unit provides an ardent approach to employee safety. It enables companies to avoid accidents by being able to constantly measure the health of their device/system.
• Increased Uptime
• HUMS allows for efficient maintenance of systems which leads to less unplanned downtime and faster turnaround times.

• Reduced Costs
• Overall maintenance and operational costs are significantly reduced in both the short and long term lifecycle of your applications. You can expect to see reductions in dedicated test runs and asset allocation overages.

The Impact of a HUMS System

A recent study of HUMS on AH-64 Apache helicopters found the following:

UEI HUMS Real World Applications

Bell UH-1N Huey Helicopter

Tyonek Global Services LLC was awarded a contract to implement HUMS on the U.S. Air Force’s fleet of Bell UH-1N Huey Helicopters. Tyonek has many in-house capabilities that made them the perfect candidate to provide the U.S. Air Force with a full end-to-end solution. For a successful HUMS system, Tyonek needed a flexible, rugged, and accurate data acquisition device that would be used to collect the information from the various sensors within the UH-1N. A challenge Tyonek faced was finding a company that had COTS hardware with the capabilities to collect both standard and advanced data and signal information. Standard information to be collected included the status of aircraft safety equipment (signal lights, warnings indicators, etc.), oil temperature, engine speed and acceleration. More advanced signals to be collected were engine torque, heading, pitch angle, roll angle, ground speed, latitude/longitude and date/time reference.

The UEI-HUMS1 system was the perfect match as the rugged chassis is DO-160 and MIL-STD-810 tested as required by the USAF for deployment on the Bell UH-1N Huey Helicopter. The UEI-HUMS1 solution simplifies life cycle management and increases reliability by providing a single Line Replaceable Unit (LRU) replacing two separate LRUs on a previous design. The I/O provided in the UEI-HUMS1 includes dozens of Analog, Digital, Synchro/Resolver, Speed/Rotation and ARINC-429 interfaces which monitor critical aircraft systems including engine, transmission, flight control positions fuel and hydraulic systems and more.

“UEI’s data aggregation system enables us to deliver a system design for the U.S. Air Force with superior data accuracy and processing power. The ability to customize the UEI component allows us to effectively match the signal processing and size constraints to the program’s requirements,” said Andy Gignilliat, Senior Aviation Program Manager, Tyonek Services Group, Inc. “The UEI system offers these enhanced capabilities while reducing material costs and increasing the ease of integration.”

Learn more - read the business use case app story.

Hybrid Busses (BAE Hybridrive)

Alexander Dennis Limited (ADL), one of the world’s leading bus and coach builders using BAE Systems Hybridrive pictured below, needed a better way to monitor the health of their bus fleets. UEI’s HUMS system, in the form of UEI's COTS compact Cube chassis with I/O, enabled ADL to log critical data from diesel engines, hybrid control systems (from BAE), battery optimization subsystems, and AC units via CAN-bus. With the use of two RS-232 ports on the same chassis, data from door control systems (VAPOR) and GPS could also be collected.



The UEI’s HUMS allowed data to be securely accessed (and stored) in real-time while busses were in service through automatic WiFi uploads to a fleet health monitoring system. ADL uses this information to prevent major breakdowns, better determine maintenance and repair times, and ensure that busses operate at peak performance and efficiency. UEI's HUM solution has been so successful it has been deployed on over 1000 buses worldwide.

Watch & Learn about UEI HUMS Solutions

Application Story: UEI & BAE Systems One of BAE Systems' most successful products, the HybriDrive® Propulsion System is a smart electric drive propulsion system that can power inner-city transit at lower costs and emission levels than traditional diesel propulsion systems. UEI helped BAE's Hybrid Buses maximize efficiency and monitor engine system health in real time. Read about the complete solution

UAV/UAS Data Acquisition and Control Solutions With the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) comes new and complex data acquisition (DAQ) and control solution problems. This comprehensive overview provides information on UEI test bench, simulation of systems, and design verification/validation solutions for UAV/UAS applications. Learn more