DE.V.I.L.S. : (DEvelopment of Vhbr engines Innovative Lubrication System)

Introduction:

DE.V.I.L.S. (DEvelopment of Vhbr engines Innovative Lubrication System) is a financed project in CleanSkyII within Horizon 2020, the biggest EU Research and Innovation program available over 7 years (2014 to 2020). In DE.V.I.L.S. the FPRG – Fluid Power Research Group of UniNA is involved for the studies of the entire lubrication circuit of a turbofan with particular attention to an innovative variable displacement Gerotor oil pump, using lumped parameter and three-dimensional CFD numerical approaches.

Description:

Aircraft Engines are normally assisted by a number of complementary systems that must guarantee performance throughout the whole flight envelope of the aircrafts for which they are designed. Among these systems, the Oil lubrication and the heat management systems are the most important due to their roles:

• Remove heat generated in the highly loaded rolling bearings and in the gears found in the Engine power and accessory gearboxes;
• Lubricate bearing, accessories and the gear box.

The current trend of developing fuel saving aircraft engines is paying attention on the oil lubrication system cooling requirements due to higher speeds, loads and temperatures in engines. This is even more true for Very High By-pass Engines due to the integration of high-power gearboxes (allowing high by-pass ratio) and high-power starter-generators. For this reason, Engine manufacturers are deeply looking to innovative design for oil lubrication and heat management systems implementing architectures that are able to meet the new cooling and lubricating requirements without negatively impacting the Engine weight or operational and maintenance costs.

The overall objective of project DE.V.I.L.S. Project is to research, develop and validate the robustness of a new variable oil flow approach towards the design an innovative variable flow oil pump to be integrated in a high performance aircraft lubrication systems architecture with the aim of reducing fuel and oil consumption. Besides, Objective of DE.V.I.L.S. project is as well to researching, implementing and validating smart fault detection and health monitoring algorithms to assist the system in reducing oil low flow rate needs and prognostic functions.

Duration: 40 months
Call: H2020-CS2-CFP03-2016-01
Total: 2,898,250.00€
Attachment: Benefit of Variable Flow Control (pdf)

DEVILS project: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/208056_en.html
Horizon 2020: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en