Assesing the Viability of Unsupervised Learning with Autoencoders for Predictive Maintenance in Helicopter Engines

Unplanned engine failures in helicopters can lead to severe operational disruptions, safety hazards, and costly repairs. To mitigate these risks, this study compares two predictive maintenance strategies for helicopter engines: a supervised classification pipeline and an unsupervised anomaly detection approach based on autoencoders (AEs). The supervised method relies on labelled examples of both normal and faulty behaviour, while the unsupervised approach learns a model of normal operation using only healthy engine data, flagging deviations as potential faults. Both methods are evaluated on a real-world dataset comprising labelled snapshots of helicopter engine telemetry. While supervised models demonstrate strong performance when annotated failures are available, the AE achieves effective detection without requiring fault labels, making it particularly well suited for settings where failure data are scarce or incomplete. The comparison highlights the practical trade-offs between accuracy, data availability, and deployment feasibility, and underscores the potential of unsupervised learning as a viable solution for early fault detection in aerospace applications.

LSTM VS. Feed-Forward Autoencoders for Unsupervised Fault Detection in Hydraulic Pumps

Unplanned failures in industrial hydraulic pumps can halt production and incur substantial costs. We explore two unsupervised autoencoder (AE) schemes for early fault detection: a feed-forward model that analyses individual sensor snapshots and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model that captures short temporal windows. Both networks are trained only on healthy data drawn from a minute-level log of 52 sensor channels; evaluation uses a separate set that contains seven annotated fault intervals. Despite the absence of fault samples during training, the models achieve high reliability.

Early Fault Detection on CMAPSS with Unsupervised LSTM Autoencoders

This paper introduces an unsupervised health-monitoring framework for turbofan engines that does not require run-to-failure labels. First, operating-condition effects in NASA CMAPSS sensor streams are removed via regression-based normalisation; then a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder is trained only on the healthy portion of each trajectory. Persistent reconstruction error, estimated using an adaptive data-driven threshold, triggers real-time alerts without hand-tuned rules. Benchmark results show high recall and low false-alarm rates across multiple operating regimes, demonstrating that the method can be deployed quickly, scale to diverse fleets, and serve as a complementary early-warning layer to Remaining Useful Life models.