FUEL NOZZLE SPRAY PATTERN CLASSIFIER

By: Mubeen Ghafoor

OUTLINE

Scope of this Study Introduction Traditional Fuel Nozzle Tester Drawbacks in Manual Testing Systems Proposed Fuel Nozzle Testing System Flow Diagram of Fuel Nozzle Spray Pattern Classifier System ROI (Region of Interest) Extraction Spray Pattern Angle Calculation Analyzing Streaks and Voids in Spray Pattern
y y

Enhancement Feature Extraction

Conclusion
2

SCOPE OF THIS STUDY

Image Processing field is expanding many folds due to cheaper imaging technologies and higher computational powers available now a days. Therefore Vision based applications are becoming much more feasible and reliable.

In this study an industrial problem of classification of faulty Fuel Nozzles is considered and a solution is proposed by analyzing their spray pattern through vision based algorithms.
3

INTRODUCTION

Fuel Nozzle is a critical component in performance of any diesel engine, especially in aircraft engines. In this study, Fuel nozzles of C-130 Hercules engine, are used. C-130 Hercules engine is a diesel engine with six fuel nozzles spraying fuel in combustion engine. If one fuel nozzle gets faulty the combustion engine can burn and may cause engine to cease during the flight. So it becomes obligatory to avoid faulty fuel nozzle at all costs. Therefore fuel nozzle testing is one of the most essential procedures involved in the maintenance of the aircraft engine.

TRADITIONAL FUEL NOZZLE TESTER

Nozzle testers are designed so that the spray pattern of the nozzle can be examined.

A Fuel nozzle is classified as faulty if,

Fuel flow is non-uniform at any part of the spray pattern. Streaks and voids are present in its spray pattern. Angles of spray pattern are not within specified range at a specific pressure.
5

TRADITIONAL FUEL NOZZLE TESTER

Currently, the spray pattern is analyzed manually by the operator.

The angle is calculated by looking at the spray pattern and then looking at its impact on arced scale.

Similarly, spray pattern is checked for any non-uniformity or streaks and voids in the fuel flow region.

6
Frontal View of Fuel Nozzle Tester

SPRAY PATTERN OF FUEL NOZZLE

DRAWBACKS IN MANUAL TESTING SYSTEMS

As spray angles and streaks and voids are measured manually by the operator. Therefore, this process may involves human error. Manual testing is time consuming. Operator has to manually record all the results corresponding to each test. Finding previous cumbersome. service history of any fuel nozzles is
8

MOTIVATION

So there is a need for a computerized system, which can observe spray pattern of fuel nozzle from the glass chamber and can classify whether fuel nozzle is functional (working properly) or it is defective.

PROPOSED FUEL NOZZLE TESTING SYSTEM

The Proposed Fuel Nozzle Spray Pattern System is composed of a Computer and a camera. The Computer continuously acquires data from the camera during a test. The operator determines when the proper test conditions are met, and captures the image for analysis and storage.

10

PROPOSED FUNCTIONALITY
The proposed system can perform the following functions automatically and accurately:

Calculate angles formed by spray pattern at different pressures. Find discontinuities, non-uniformities, streaks and voids in spray pattern. Classify whether fuel nozzle is functional (working properly) or it is defective based on above two functionalities. Save results of fuel nozzles in database.
11

PROPOSED FLOW DIAGRAM OF FUEL NOZZLE SPRAY PATTERN CLASSIFIER

Input Image Grey Scale Conversion

ROI Extraction

Find Angles Subtended by Spray Pattern at specific pressure

Streaks and Voids Detection in Spray Pattern

Acceptability Criteria

Fuel Nozzle Serviceability Status

12

ROI (REGION OF INTEREST) EXTRACTION

The intensity values of image throughout the fuel flow region is almost same, and it is different from background The fuel flow region is bounded between the two external lines of Spray pattern. To extract these lines : Firstly, edges are extracted using Canny edge detector. Then Hough transform for straight lines is calculated. To extract fuel flow region, only two most distinctive lines are selected, which gives external lines of fuel flow region. For ROI extraction region between these two lines is cropped from original image. Hough transform also gives Spray Angles of these two lines. 13

ANALYZING STREAKS AND VOIDS IN SPRAY PATTERN

Apply Gabor Filtering Feature Extraction Euclidean Distance Classifier

Enhancement Input Image

Streaks Voids Status

Flow Diagram for Analyzing Streaks and Voids in Spray Pattern

14

ENHANCEMENT
The non-uniform spread of light causes non-uniform illumination over the fuel flow image so some parts of flow appear darker as compared to outer parts of flow which requires illumination adjustment. This discrepancy can be catered by using Homomorphic filtering.
Input Image Log of Image

Fourier Transform

High Frequency Emphasis Filtering Inverse Fourier Transform

Exponential of Image Enhanced Image

15

FEATURE EXTRACTION

The central part of the feature extraction lies within the Gabor filtering stage. The purpose of the filtering stage is to enhance the streak and voids structure while reducing noise in the image. The real part of 2-D Gabor function is given by a cosine wave modulated by a Gaussian is given as.
1 x 2 y 2 g ( x, y : U , f ) ! exp  U 2  U 2 . cos(2TfxU ) W y 2Wx
x = x cos + y sin , y = -x sin + y cos . Where f is the frequency of cosine wave, is the orientation of filter, x and y are the standard deviations of the Gaussian envelope along the x-axes and y-axes, respectively

16

FEATURE EXTRACTION

Gabor filters of different frequencies and directions are applied on the enhanced fuel flow image. For each filtered variance of the output image within ROI is computed. Mean of these variances is estimated and saved as a feature for that nozzle.

17
Figure shows application of Gabor filter on enhanced image of faulty and functional fuel nozzles.

TRAINING

We have trained our classifier by taking 50 functional (properly working) fuel nozzles and 50 defective fuel nozzles. So there are in total 100 features for a specific pressure.

18

TESTING
For classifying a test fuel nozzle these steps are followed:

ROI of test fuel nozzle is extracted Spray Angle are estimated Fuel Flow Pattern is enhanced by Homomorphic filtering Enhanced image is convolved by Gabor filter bank and feature for test nozzle is calculated This test feature is then compared with features of training set using Euclidean distance classifier

19

TESTING

Test fuel nozzle is classified as functional if;

y

Spray Angles are within range for a specific pressure, Euclidean distance between features of functional fuel nozzles and feature of test fuel nozzle is smaller as compared to Euclidean distance between features of defective fuel nozzles and feature of test fuel nozzle.

20

CONCLUSION

A reliable, time efficient and cost effective solution based on vision test systems is proposed for the ease of operators and quality control engineers. Automated image analysis measurements greatly reduce errors that are introduced by operator when using manual measurement techniques. Using this system, the process time for image acquisition, image analysis, and saving results in database is very less as compared to manual system.

21

Q&A

22