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Turbofan exhaust gas temperature forecasting and performance monitoring

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Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)
Edited by Maria Chiara Leva, Edoardo Patelli, Luca Podofillini, and Simon Wilson
©2022 ESREL2022 Organizers. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.
doi: 10.3850/978-981-18-5183-4_S30-03-504-cd

Turbofan exhaust gas temperature forecasting and performance monitoring with a

neural network model

LANGHENDRIES Raphaël1,2 and LACAILLE Jérôme2

1
Université Paris I - SAMM, 90 rue de tolbiac, Paris, France.
2
Safran Aircraft Engines, 77550 Moissy-Cramayel, France.
E-mail: r.langhendries@gmail.com and jerome.lacaille@safrangroup.com

Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT) denotes the temperature of the exhaust gas when it leaves the turbine. EGT is an
important parameter for measuring the energy efficiency of a turbofan engine. Indeed, the heat energy produced by
an aircraft engine corresponds to a loss of power. Therefore, forecasting the exhaust gas temperature is a key task to
monitor the engine performance and schedule maintenance operations. In this paper, we propose a new method for
forecasting EGT throughout engine life. The EGT is regarded as a time series, for each flight we aim to predict the
EGT during the cruise. Our model is a neural network that leans on recurrent networks and attention mechanisms to
compute a state vector that represents the wear of the engine. Moreover, we show that this state vector can be used
to monitor the engine’s energy efficiency over time.

Keywords: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Attention Mechanisms, Prognostic Health Management, Exhaust Gas
Temperature, Turbofan Engine.

1. Introduction a result, the temperature of the exhaust gas is an

Energy efficiency of aircraft engines is a ma-
jor economic and environmental issue closely
watched by airlines and the aeronautics industry,
indeed the fuel consumption of the aircraft di-
rectly depends on the engine’s efficiency. Con-
sequently, much research has been undertaken to
evaluate the engine’s efficiency, monitor it across
engine operations and forecast its evolution.
Moreover, it has been established that engine
wear negatively impacts energy efficiency (La-
caille et al. (2013)). The link between wear and
energy efficiency is therefore an important field of
research.
2. Background
2.1. EGT during cruise and turbofan
efficiency
The efficiency of a turbofan can be expressed
as the mechanical energy provided by the turbo-
fan (the thrust) divided by the energy supplied
to the turbofan (the heating value of the fuel).
Apart from mechanical energy, heat energy is also
released by the engines. But heat energy is not
used and is mostly dissipated in exhaust gas. As
indicator of the amount of energy lost and thus of
the overall efficiency of the engine.
A normal aircraft flight can be divided into sev-
eral phases: TakeOff, Climb, Cruise, Descent, Ap-
proach etc. The cruise is usually the longest phase
during which the plane reaches its maximum dis-
tance. During this phase altitude and speed remain
stable. For those reasons, the efficiency during
the cruise phase is capital to ensure the optimal
functioning of the engine and that’s why we focus
on the EGT measured during the cruise.
2.2. Real flight data
We describe below our dataset. We use two kinds
of data.
Snapshot. For each flight phase, the engine com-
puter records the measurements of sensors at-
tached to the engine or to the aircraft. Such records
are called snapshots. We use snapshots from the
takeoff, climb and cruise phases.
Environmental data. We also use data describ-
ing the environment where aircraft are operated
(i.e. departure and arrival airports). We have data

3095
3096 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)

 
related to the weather (temperature, pressure, etc.) Zsi s<t and Xti ). Consequently, abrupt changes
and data describing the air pollution (dust, salt can sometimes occur in the EGT.
concentration etc.). We provide below an example of a cruise EGT.
An abrupt dynamic change can be observed near
2.3. Notations and main goal flight 800. This change is caused by a maintenance
For each engine and for each flight we retrieve operation that has decreased the EGT.
data from the takeoff, climb and cruise snapshots
and environmental data (weather and air pollution
at the departure and arrival airport). For engine i
and flight t, we denote by Zti this vector. The EGT
recorded during the cruise phase for the engine i

Temperature (°C)
and flight t is denoted Eti .
We emphasize that the EGT Eti is included in
the vector Zti . Moreover, other features strongly
correlated with the EGT are also included in Zti
(for example internal temperature in the engine).
Therefore, we also define the vector Xti equal to
Zti into which we remove the EGT Eti and any
features directly related to the engine operation
Cycles Since New
except the rotational speed of the turbine engine
(denoted N1 which represents the thrust delivered
by the engine). Fig. 1. EGT during cruise phase, the abscissa cor-
Indeed, our problem is to predict the EGT using responds to the number of operating cycles and the
past data Zsi s<t and data describing the flight ordinate to the measured EGT (degree Celsius). For
number t (the vector Xti ). confidentiality matters, the temperature scale on the y-
axis is not provided.

3. Model
3.1. Towards a probabilistic model
The cruise EGT during flight depends on condi-
tions at flight t (thrust delivered by the engine,
altitude, external temperature, etc.) and the state
of the engine at time t (which depends on past
data). However, other events can impact the per-
formance of the aircraft. In particular, water-wash
are common maintenance operations that consist
in washing the engine in order to remove airborne
particles that can build up in the engine. Such
maintenance operation are regularly carried out
by airline companies and aim to restore engine
performance (Chen and Sun (2018)).
Besides water-wash, many other events can im-
pact aircraft performance: it includes every main-
tenance operations and component replacements.
Such events mainly depend on the mainte-
nance policy of airline companies and are not
always possible to predict with available data (i.e.
Due to such operations, instead of investigating
deterministic models to predict EGT, it appears
more promising to learn a probabilistic model that
fits the EGT distribution for each flight.
In this way, we aim to take account of the
uncertainty linked to maintenance policy.
3.2. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)
A gaussian mixture is a probability distribution
consisting of a superposition of m gaussian densi-
ties. An introduction to gaussian mixtures can be
found in Bishop (2006) Chapter 2.3.9).
Probability density for a m components gaus-
sian mixture is defined by
m

pi,j
t (x) = πti,j N (μi,j i,j
t , σt ). (1)
j=1
To simplify we will now imply indices i (the
engine) and t (the flight cycle) when necessary.
 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)
(π j )j∈[1,m] are called mixture coefficients and
m
their sum must be equal to 1 (i.e. j=1 π j =
1). Coefficients (μj , σ j )j∈[1,m] are respectively
expectations and standard deviations of gaussian
random variables.
The gaussian mixture model seems pertinent to
use in our context. Indeed, we expect to model
the uncertainty due to the several possible main-
tenance operations using several gaussian com-
ponents. In this way, our problem is to compute
 each engine i and each flight t parameters
for
πti,j , μi,j i,j
t , σt with j ∈ [1, m]. The number of
gaussian components (m) is a hyper-parameter.
The gaussian mixture model is commonly used
in the field of prognostic health management. For
example Wei et al. (2022) uses GMM to predict
the RUL (Remaining Useful Life) of batteries. In
the aerospace field, gaussian mixture models are
also used in the context of unsupervised learning
for fault detection (for example Lacaille et al.
(2014)).
3.3. State vector
For each engine and flight, we aim to compute
the gaussian mixture parameters based on current
flight condition data and past data. In particular,
we rely on data Zsi s<t to compute a state vector
describing the health state of the engine i after
flight t − 1.
3.4. Recurrent network
To compute the state vector, we chose to use a
recurrent neural network. The most simple type of
recurrent networks is vanilla recurrent networks,
they have been previously used for RUL estima-
tion (for example Liu et al. (2010)). However
those network are exposed to the vanishing and
exploding gradient issue.
Gated recurrent network is another type of
recurrent network that has been introduced to
deal with those issues. It includes Long Short
Term Memory (LSTM) networks (Hochreiter and
Schmidhuber (1997)).  
In our context, inputs are vectors Zsi s<t rep-
resenting the flight and the hidden state hit is the
state vector for the engine i after flight t.
3097
The use of gated recurrent networks to com-
pute the physical state of a device has become
a common idea in the PHM field. It has already
been proposed for example in Wu et al. (2018)
for RUL (Remaining Useful Life) estimation and
in Langhendries and Lacaille (2021) for survival
analysis in the aerospace field. Moreover, recent
works (for example Zhong et al. (2018)) use an-
other type of gated recurrent network (i.e. GRU)
for EGT forecasting and show that such meth-
ods achieve state of the art performance. We also
emphasize that recurrent networks can be stacked
into layers (hidden states computed by first re-
current network are used as inputs by a second
recurrent network). It allows the capture of more
complex information in the final layer of hidden
states. In this work, we used two stacked LSTM
but to simplify notations we will continue to de-
note and draw the recurrent layer as there is only
one LSTM.
3.5. Attention mechanisms
Attention mechanisms are a recent advance in
the deep learning field (Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar,
Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser, and Polosukhin
(Vaswani et al.)). The key idea is to allow a neural
network to learn which part of the input to fo-
cus on. Initially, attention based neural network
demonstrate their capabilities in the NLP field.
Recent works also demonstrate the pertinence
of such architectures for the PHM. For example
Muneer et al. (2021) and Liu and Wang (2021)
use attention mechanisms to estimate RUL for
turbofan (based on a simulated dataset). A review
on different attention mechanisms can be found in
Galassi et al. (2019).
In this work, two different attention mecha-
nisms are used. The first one is the short term
attention it aims to find among recent past flights
of the engine those more pertinent to focus on in
order to predict EGT at time t. The second one is
the long term attention. It concerns state vector.
3.5.1. Short term attention
This first attention mechanism focuses on flights.
We compute attention weights according to the
following equations.
3098 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)
as,t = (W2 ) σ (W1 [Xs , Xt ] + w0 ) . (2)
exp(as,t )
αs,t = t−1 . (3)
r=ta exp(ar,t )
Then, the flight context is computed as follows
t−1

Cf (t) = αs,t Zs . (4)
s=ta
The notations Xt and Zt are defined in Section
2.3, we omit the engine index i to simplify the
notations. σ is a sigmoid function, w0 , W1 and
W2 are parameters. t − 1 − ta is the number of
flights considered, smaller is ta and more flights
are considered.
The compatibility function used to compute the
attention weights for the flight context is the con-
catenation function (see Table 3 from Galassi et al.
(2019)). The purpose of this compatibility func-
tion is to compute a degree of similarity between
flight s and t (because more flights are similar,
more we would like to pay attention to flight s
to compute EGT for flight s). We chose to make
this compatibility function learnable in order to
let the model learn by itself a suitable measure of
similarity. However, this represents a cost in terms
of computing power during the training phase of
the model. Thus, the ta cannot be too small.
3.5.2. Long term attention
The second attention mechanism concerns state
vectors. Attention weights are computed accord-
ing to the following equations.
bs,t = sim (hs , ht−1 ) . (5)
exp(bs,t )
βs,t = t−1 . (6)
r=tb exp(br,t )
Where sim denotes the cosine similarity func-
tion.
Cosine similarity plays the role of compatibility
function for long term attention. Cosine similarity
does not involve learnable parameters. Therefore,
we are not limited by computing power issues
during training phase and are able to consider a lot
of past state vectors. Thus, tb can be much smaller
than ta .
The state context is computed as follows
t−1

Cs (t) = βs,t hs . (7)
s=tb
3.5.3. Gaussian mixture network
Finally, parameters of the gaussian mixture can
be computed using the two contexts Cs (t) and
Cf (t) and data Xt concerning flight t. Vectors
Cs (t), Cf (t) and Xt are concatenated and fed to
a dense neural network. The output is separated
into means μ, standards deviations σ and mixture
coefficients π. Function softplus (resp softmax) is
used to ensure that standard deviations are positive
(resp the sum of mixture coefficients is equal to
one).
A figure representing the full model is provided
(Figure 2).
3.6. Loss function
Several parameters occurred in the model (in the
recurrent networks, the short term attention model
and the gaussian mixture network). These param-
eters need to be optimized and thus we need to
define a loss function to minimize. The purpose of
this section is to define this function.
A common choice to fit parameters of a proba-
bilistic model is to maximize the likelihood func-
tion. Denoting i the engine index, ni the number
of flights available for engine i, m the number of
gaussian components, θ parameters of the model
and fμ the probability density function. The like-
lihood is defined by
  i∈[1,n]   n   
L θ| Zti t∈[1,ni ] = fμ Zti t∈[1,n ] |θ ,
i
i=1
(8)
assuming engines are pairwise independent.
We now focus on one engine and thus omit the
index i of this engine. Then, it holds
 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022) 3099

Fig. 2. Neural network model for EGT forecasting

   
  L θ| Zti t∈[1,ni ]
fμ (Zt )t∈[1,ni ] |θ (9) ⎛ ⎛  ⎞⎞
ni m j j 2
ni
 ni
 π 1 Z t − μ
=− ln ⎝ t
exp ⎝− t ⎠⎠
= fμ (Xt ) fμ (Zt |Xt , Zt−1 . . . Z1 , θ) . j 2 σtj
t=1 j=1 σt
t=1 t=1
(10) (12)

ni 3.7. Implementation
The density t=1 fμ (Xt ) does not depend on
model parameters θ. Thus this term can be omitted We implemented the model using PyTorch. The
in the loss function. dense network for the short term attention mech-
We denote πtj , μjt , σtj parameters of the gaus- anism is composed of two layers. The dense net-
sian mixture. πtj (same for μjt and σtj ) denotes work that computes the gaussian mixture coeffi-
the mixture coefficient for the flight t and the cients is composed of four layers. Three gaussian
gaussian mixture j (therefore πtj depends on components are used. The model is trained using
Xt , Zt−1 . . . Z1 , θ). a dataset of 800 engines (all Leap1A) and validate
on another dataset of 22 engines. Throughout the
rest of the article, all given results are obtained on
fμ (Zt |Xt , Zt−1 . . . Z1 , θ) this validation dataset.
⎛  ⎞
m j 2
πtj 1 Z t − μ 4. Results and Applications
= j√
exp ⎝− t ⎠.
j=1 σt 2π
2 σtj 4.1. Comparison with a flight by flight
(11) (FbF) dense neural network
In this section, we compare results obtained using
Maximizing the likelihood is equivalent to min- our model to results obtained using a baseline
imizing the negative log likelihood. Therefore, we model. The chosen baseline model is a neural
can choose the following loss function network taking for each engine and each flight
3100 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)

the vector Xti and computing a ẽit . To train the

Temperature Difference (Δ °C)

baseline model, we minimized theMSE loss 2(i.e.
 ni
for one engine LM i
SE
= n1i t=1 ẽit − Eti ).
Concerning our model, for each engine and
each flight we use a Monte Carlo methods to
estimate the average MSE. It consists in drawing
several EGT from the given gaussian mixture (we
practice we draw 1000 values) and computing the
mean loss.
Table 1 gives the results and is provided in the
Appendix.
Engines 4 and 5 stand apart. Engine 5 is the
only one for which the baseline performs better Cycles Since New
and the two models perform poorly for engine 4

Temperature Difference (Δ °C)

and 5 compared to all other.
The case of engine number 4 is investigated
below. EGT and model error are provided in the
Appendix (Figure 5). We notice three flights with
an EGT in the cruise phase around 100 degrees
Celsius. such outliers cannot be real data (the EGT
cannot be so low).
The poor performance of the two models is
directly due to these three outliers (Figure 5).

4.2. Performance monitoring: brandnew

engine vs worn engine
The health state of each engine is represented by
the state vector. This state vector is computed ac-
cording to past flights of the engine and initialized
at zero for the first flight. We suggest to compare
the EGT predicted by the model for the engine
to the EGT predicted by the model for the same
engine but with state vector corresponding to an
unused condition. This technique allows to moni-
tor the engine’s performance deterioration across
time. That’s as we did in Figure 3.
We emphasize that initially all engine are as-
sumed equivalent (same state vector). It is not
the case in practice. Indeed we know from tests
before delivery that engines can show different
performance. Thus it takes some flights to get the
state vector representative to the real engine state.
That is why, to represent the unused condition, we
fixed the state vector after thirty flights and not
zero. It also explains the negative value and high
volatility of the indicator at the beginning of the
engine life.
Cycles Since New
Fig. 3. For engines number 16 and 21 of the validation
set. We draw the difference between EGT predicted
by the model throughout engine’s operation and EGT
predicted by the model throughout engine’s operation
for the same engine but without aging.
This approach allows to spot brutal degradation
(such that for engine 16 around flight 1400). It also
allows to evaluate the impact of maintenance op-
erations (for engine 21 around flight 1500 heavy
operations are achieved).
4.3. Engines compared with each other
It is also possible to register the state vector during
the engine’s life and to compute an average EGT
computed on a sample of flights. If this sample is
sufficiently representative, the average EGT will
be representative of the overall performance of the
engine. This technique allow to compare engines
with each other over their lifetime.
 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022) 3101

state vectors calculated from past flights to de-

scribe the health status of the engine at any time.
Moreover, we presented possible applications to
performance monitoring. It includes estimation of
Temperature (°C)

the EGT overheating due to engine wearing and

performance comparisons between engines.
The model is implemented and tested on real
flight data from the Leap1A engine.

Acknowledgement

Cycles Since New This work has been support by a CIFRE contract be-
tween Safran Aircraft Engines and University Paris 1
Pantheon Sorbonne.
Temperature (°C)

Appendix A. Results: comparison with the

baseline.

Table 1. MSE (Mean Squared Error) comparison between

flight by flight neural model and the proposed attention based
model. MSE for attention model is obtained with a Monte
Cycles Since New Carlo method.
Engine number FbF model Attention based model
0 410.30 171.66
Fig. 4. For engine number 8 and 15, we displayed 1 348.65 60.60
the average EGT predicted by the model on the same 2 248.66 159.10
sample of flights (10000 flights drawn randomly). 3 194.72 27.81
4 1274.73 783.82
5 542.94 757.67
We present results on average EGT in Figures 6 166.31 75.89
4. We can observe that engines number 8 and 15 7 316.89 160.93
display very different performances. At the begin- 8 373.70 138.89
ning of their operation, engine 8 seems more ef- 9 175.69 113.50
10 180.19 74.88
ficient than engine 15 (around 30 degrees Celsius
11 156.19 42.35
colder). However, a heavy maintenance operation 12 378.34 50.73
has been performed on engine 15 around flight 13 119.87 111.22
800 thus engine 15 is now colder. 14 216.32 22.56
15 338.66 117.11
5. Conclusion 16 135.21 85.04
17 203.22 142.65
In this article, we introduced a new model based 18 100.02 52.89
on neural network (it includes recurrent networks 19 126.15 109.23
and attention mechanisms) and gaussian mixture 20 44.24 28.19
model in order to estimates the EGT (Exhaust 21 188.26 44.14
Gas Temperature) of engines across time. We used 22 217.84 15.97
3102 Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)

Appendix B. Results: EGT for engine Neural Attention Models in Natural Language
number 4. Processing. arXiv:1902.02181 [cs, stat]. arXiv:
1902.02181.
Hochreiter, S. and J. Schmidhuber (1997, 11).
Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computa-
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Temperature (°C)

Lacaille, J., A. Bellas, C. Bouveyron, and M. Cot-

trell (2014). Online Normalization Algorithm
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Lacaille, J., A. Gouby, and O. Piol (2013). Wear
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Langhendries, R. and J. Lacaille (2021). Deep
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