Electrical Wiring Interconnect

KBR is a leading provider of AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015-certified sustainment engineering services to the Department of Defense and other federal agencies and foreign allies. The solutions KBR develops and implements enhance mission capability. KBR’s mission is to extend the life of legacy systems, reduce life cycle costs, and increase availability and reliability.

Areas of Expertise

Aircraft chafing analysis

Component locational and failure data

Destructive analysis

Damage, maintenance, and repair locations on modeled systems

Environmental hazard zone identification

High-density failure locations and high-risk zone hot spotting

High-power circuit identification/location

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)

Remaining service life analysis

System safety reports

Capabilities

KBR’s electrical wiring interconnect (EWIS) team applies advanced technologies and methods such as digital engineering to identify, predict, prevent and correct system problems in accordance with MIL-STD-1798D and MIL-HDBK-525, core tasks one through seven.

Aircraft Functional and Physical Hazard Assessment (AFPHA)

• Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA)

• Fault tree analysis

• Hot spotting

Physical Hazard Assessment (PHA)

• Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA)

• Life Data Analysis (LDA)

• Aircraft physical inspections

Materials/Aging Analysis

• Risk analysis

• Modeling, simulation, and training

• Cost-benefit analysis

• Data mining and analysis

Why EWIS?

In 1999, the FAA initiated this program after electrical systems were implicated in several high-profile aircraft accidents. Examination of USAF mishaps over 10 years showed that 53% of electrical mishaps are associated with wire conductors, connectors, distribution panels or circuit breakers.

KBR has designed a comprehensive EWIS program for the A-10, F-15, F-16 and T-38. This includes identifying all wiring, fiber optic links, fiber devices or a combination of these items (including terminations) installed in any area of the aircraft for the purpose of transmitting electrical energy, signals or data between two or more points. KBR’s EWIS goal is to extend aircraft life span, improve aircraft availability, enhance airworthiness, increase aircraft safety and expand awareness of EWIS.

Resources

MIL-STD-1798D: MECSIP Program
MIL-STD-882E: System Safety
MIL-HDBK-525: EWIS Program Outlined
MIL-HDBK-522: EWIS Inspection Guidelines
NAVAIR 01-1A-505-1: Aircraft Electric and Electronic Wiring

Analytic Software: KBR uses NLign (developed by Etegent Technologies) to track, identify, display, analyze and compare different types of EWIS-related hotspots. The density of data points (below left) can be viewed and compared to other nearby clusters to determine high-failing parts or locations. Medini (developed by Ansys) is used to design schematic diagrams that map critical paths (below right) and fault trees to demonstrate criticality; Medini also stores and performs various safety calculations, including failure rates for fault trees and FMECAs.