Of course. It has been done. Depends on the failure mode, of course. There
are some failure modes that take a long time to develop that give early
indications, and some that don't. A ton of work has been done in this area
for military jet engines. Seeded fault test data is the key to this.
Unfortunately, that might mean wrecking a bunch of engines to get the data.
It's not a project for the average home-builder.

Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to get a vibration caution together for
a home-built. Doing right would be just way too expensive. It would be
cheaper to just buy something that's turbine-powered and get rid of the
hazards that way. Besides, a huge number of failure modes already show up in
CHT's, EGT's, RPMs, etc. You have to weigh the cost of covering additional
failure modes against the hazards. This is really a job for engine
manufacturers. Additionally, you have to take complexity and reliability of
the sensing and processing into account. A monitor that is always going
haywire on you would be worse than nothing at all.

I'm actually looking at some stuff like this for possible inclusion on a
future project right now for a different type of powerplant. If you can
reliably predict RUL (remaining usable life) for a critical component, it
could be possible to reduce the amount of redundancy in a complex system and
rely on health monitoring functions to let you know when it's time to
replace the part.

PHM (prognostics and health management) has been a big focus in the military
aircraft world in recent years. I'm hoping that some of this technology will
trickle down to us in the GA world. Hmm...maybe I should get with an engine
manufacturer and work something out... SO, how much would people pay for an
engine health monitoring system package as an option for a new engine (i.e.
one of the new generation...maybe a DeltaHawk)? My guess is that it would be
too expensive to ever sell.

Pete


"LCT Paintball" wrote in message
news:ipA0e.102105$Ze3.20828@attbi_s51...
Are you suggesting that a bad engine will give clues to it's demise enough
in advance that you could actually do something about it? Clues that a
monitor could pick up on, but an experienced pilot wouldn't?