QuantWear: Quantum-scale Wear Particle Detection for Jet Engine Diagnosis

Abstract

The quantity and 3-D shape of wear particles are essential indicators for assessing the health of jet engines, enabling early detection of potential damage and preventing accidents caused by catastrophic failures. However, capturing wear particles is difficult due to their minute sizes and ultra high-speed movement within intense jet flows. Existing technologies struggle with the extreme background noise and low resolution in such harsh environments. In this paper, we propose QuantWear, the first quantum sensing system designed to directly quantify and profile wear particles on the sub-millimeter scale. QuantWear innovatively tracks wear particles by monitoring the spectral signatures of Sodium (Na) and Potassium (K) atoms within jet flow, which naturally adhere to particle surfaces due to electrochemical reactions in high-temperature combustion. We construct a custom atomic detector that leverages quantum jump and Faraday rotation effects to isolate these specific atomic signals, effectively suppressing the broad-spectrum flame noise. Next, we apply a deep learning framework to effectively measure the quantity of wear particles in dynamic vaporous backgrounds. Finally, we generate a fully reconstructed 3-D model of the wear particles from multiple 2-D images. Extensive field tests and high-fidelity simulations demonstrate that QuantWear achieves an imaging Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 22.5 dB and a 3-D reconstruction similarity exceeding 95%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art technologies.