M.Ed. (Curriculum Studies) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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D.Ed. / In the past number of years the practical training of apprentice aircraft technicians has undergone a major change when it moved over to Modular Criterium Based Training. The theoretical training at technical colleges did not change phenominally over the past number of years. The aircraft industries thus requested that something should be done about the overlapping of the training. This problem could be effectively attended to by the present renewal that is busy occurring in the education and training in South Africa. If the technical colleges' learning programs could be curriculated and presented as outcome based programs, as suggested by the discussion document of the Department of Education (Department of Education, 1997b), it could be to the advantage of apprentice aircraft technicians and the whole aircraft industry in the future. An outcomes based curriculum framework is suggested in this study for the design of a curriculum framework for Aircraft Theory. Guidelines were discussed on how such a curriculum framework could be designed for Aircraft Theory, but these guidelines could be used with good results on the other trade theory subjects in the technical colleges in order that these courses could also be re-curriculated to be presented as outcomes based. The curriculum framework which was determined by the suggested outcomes based framework, have a situation analysis and critical outcomes as a first step in order that specific outcomes could be determined in the next step. The assessment is done according to assessment criteria and range statements as a third step and after this the performance indicators are left to the lecturer/facilitator to, in co-operation with the learners, determine it. These different steps have a close relationship with each other and need not be determined as rigid steps which have to follow each other. A point that should be kept in mind is that the changes in technical colleges could not only be of a cosmetic nature, to present outcomes based courses the daily timetable will be different and it will have many other administrative implications. The course will concentrate much less on subjects like Mathematics, Engineering Science and Engineering Drawing, although these subjects will still be there present in them, but not with such intensity. The writer would prefer a system which is used in Germany (Bayerisches Staatsministerium far Unterricht, Wissenschaft and Kunst, 1994: 4) where the "Fachtheorie" is prominent and the "Fachrechnen" and "Fachzeichnen" are much less prominent. The necessary implications at the National Qualification Framework will have to be addressed in order that the course will enjoy recognition in this setup too. The training of apprentice aircraft technicians could be improved further if the technical colleges and the training centres of the aircraft industry would take the time to determine which training will be done in which organisation and to spell it out clearly. Furthermore they should be closely working together to the advantage of the aircraft technical apprentices and eventually to the advantage of the aircraft industry as a whole.

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In the last two decades, the emphasis in aircraft maintenance has been on developing online structural health monitoring systems to replace conventional non destructive inspection techniques which require considerable down-time, human effort and cost. Vibration based damage detection is one of the most promising techniques for implementation in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). In vibration based methods, the presence of damage is detected by monitoring changes in one of the dynamic parameters of the structure, resonant frequencies, modeshapes or damping characteristics. Compared to modeshape based methods, frequency based methods have the advantage that measurements need to be taken only at a single location. Previous developments on frequency based techniques have relied on Finite Element Model updating; analytical techniques have hitherto been restricted to beams due to the complexity in developing equations for cracked two dimensional structures. In this thesis the analytical approach using an energy formulation is extended to plates with through-thickness cracks, where modeshapes from either numerical modelling or experimental measurements can be employed to determine the energy of vibration. It is demonstrated that by using a hybrid approach, incorporating experimentally measured modeshapes along with measured changes in frequencies, the damage parameters can be estimated without resorting to theoretical modelling or numerical analysis. The inverse problem of finding the crack location, size and orientation from measured changes in frequencies is addressed using minimisation techniques. The forward problem and the inverse algorithm is first validated using numerical simulation and experimental testing of beams with edge cracks and centre cracks. The application of the methodology to the two dimensional case is then validated by numerical simulation and experimental modal analysis of plates with through thickness cracks. A statistical procedure is developed for determination of the 90/95 probability of crack detection and the minimum detectable crack size in both cases. It is demonstrated that the measurement of frequency changes can be successfully employed to detect and assess the location and size of cracks in beams and plates, using modeshapes from theory, Finite Element Analysis.

An analytical method for predicting life-cycle maintainability labor costs is developed. The purpose of the analytical method is to allow the evaluation of products, based on life-cycle labor cost, early in the design process. The Boeing 737-300/400/500 Bleed Air Control System is used as a test model, and the results of the analysis are compared with historical data from this system. Four prospective design changes to the Bleed Air Control System are analyzed to demonstrate the ability of the analytical method to compare different designs or design changes. / Graduation date: 1997

Thesis (Ph.D)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Co-Chair: George L. Nemhauser; Committee Co-Chair: Martin W. P. Savelsbergh; Committee Member: Bruce K. Sawhill; Committee Member: Joel Sokol; Committee Member: Ozlem Ergun. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

This thesis addresses two planning problems motivated by the operations of PSOD air transportation: scheduled maintenance planning, and base location and fleet allocation. In the first part of the thesis, we study tactical planning for scheduled maintenance which determines the daily maintenance capacities for two operating conditions: a growth phase and the steady state. We model tactical maintenance capacity planning during the growth phase as an integer program and develop an optimization-based local search to solve the problem. Tactical planning of steady state maintenance capacity concerns a special case for which we determine the optimal and the long run capacities with a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm. In the second part of the thesis, we address operational planning for scheduled maintenance which is concerned with assigning itineraries to jets and determining the specific jets to be scheduled for maintenance on a daily basis given a certain maintenance capacity. We present a solution methodology that employs a look-ahead approach to consider the impact of our current decisions on the future and decomposes the problem exploiting the differences between jets with respect to the proximity to their next maintenance. We further develop an integrated framework in order to capture the interaction between operational level maintenance decisions and flight scheduling. In the third and final part of the thesis, we present the tactical level base location and fleet allocation problem. As PSOD air transportation experiences changes in travel demand and fleet size, decisions regarding where to open new bases and how to allocate the number of jets among the bases are made. We first present a solution approach in which high level information about flight scheduling is used in a traditional facility location problem. We next develop a model that works directly with transportation requests and integrates a simplified version of flight scheduling with the base location and fleet allocation decisions in order to capture more detail.