Aerospace testing reaches the summit

NIWeek, National Instruments' annual graphical system design conference and exhibition witnessed presentations showcasing how mil/aero customers can use its technology to innovate, saving time and money to more effectively address today's global economic challenges. Mike Richardson reports. Claimed to be the industry's premier event on graphical system design, National Instruments (NI) hosted its NIWeek in Austin, Texas in August, attracting more than 3,000 of the world's brightest engineers and scientists. For three days, the event provided interactive technical sessions, targeted summits, hands-on workshops, and exhibitions on the latest developments for design, control, automation, manufacturing and test. The conference featured keynote presentations and demonstrations to highlight how engineers and scientists can use NI's graphical system design to test, measure, and fix inefficient products and processes. NI also boasted a record number of over 500 people attending its Military and Aerospace Summit. Held over two days, a total of 10 customer and developer presentations focused on key applications in mil/aero - quite a feat considering that the sector's players tend to keep their cards close to their collective chests. One notable keynote speaker was a John Muratore, a research associate professor at the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI). Muratore delivered a keynote session on the importance of flight testing, going back to the Wright Brothers and how they pioneered a homemade wind tunnel to perform tests towards understanding aerofoil development, right the way through to modern testing and some of the innovative developments taking place at NASA. He also delivered a separate session on flight testing at UTSI using PXI and LabVIEW, and how it managed to use PXI in a twin engine aircraft for flight testing to enable students to understand flight testing as a test platform. Following on from Muratore was John Hall from the US Air force's Aeroacoustics Research Complex (ARC) at White Sands, New Mexico. He discussed an application using 3D sound mapping techniques with microphones to test the concepts of different aerofoils by using many simultaneously sampled channels in a PXI chassis to assess aircraft noise. This meant flying F-16s over White Sands' missile base and it was the first system that has ever been created to map supersonic sound. ARC's research hopes to create new aerofoil that is much quieter when flying over land. Next up was Dave Baker, vice president of engineering for Texas-based systems integrator, G Systems. The company has created a vehicle systems integration facility (VSIF) test solution for testing systems integration on the F-35. This required over 2,000 channels of data acquisition and is used at the final assembly stage to test all the systems and subsystems on the aircraft. Finally, Darryn La Zar, vice president of sales and marketing for Wineman Technology explained how his company created ‘Iron bird', a scaled layout of the entire hydraulic test system for the 787 Dreamliner and a very critical part of the aircraft's evaluation, certification and product improvement procedure. The test system was developed to allow the components in the hydraulic flight system to be tested as an integrated system without being installed in the aircraft itself. The complex test system allows development teams to test the system under ‘real world' conditions in a laboratory, long before the first test flight. G Systems laid out the entire systems of the aircraft in the same physical scale as it would be on the finished product and then tested the control systems by simulation as though it was actually flying. Thus, before the aircraft has actually physically flown, G Systems has been able to simulate it flying in the lab. Whenever it makes a software revision or an update to any of the systems, the company's test engineers can perform regression testing to ensure they didn't disrupt anything when they updated parts of the software. “The Mil/Aero Summit covered many different areas with the common thread of satisfying the need to manage test data over long periods of time,” explains NI's military & aerospace market development manager, Tim Fountain. “One of the growing trends we're seeing is a demand to ruggedise PXI test equipment. Customers want to take the PXI test system and move it towards the frontline so that it can literally sit beside the aircraft. They want to ruggedise their systems, make them more weatherproof and reduce the amount of physical moving between the frontline and the depot.” Testing on the frontline As well as a requirement for the ruggedisation of test equipment, Fountain notes an increasing interest in engineers wanting to locate ruggedised test systems on aircraft in order to effect instrumentation of the actual application for two specific reasons: testing a system, and recording and logging data. Indeed, as the technology shrinks, customers are looking to miniaturise their ‘rack and stack' systems and move them towards the frontline. The ever increasing electronics content on aircraft will surely signal increasing amounts of test and measurement challenges for companies like NI. Fountain suggests that the F-35 is a classic example of where a modern design is going in terms of removing traditional hydraulic components, the increase in complex electronics and with it, the huge issues of test integration. “We can't ignore the US Department of Defense's (DoD's) prediction that the F-35 will be the last manned jet fighter,” he continues. “The implications here are that the DoD will grow its use of UAVs. However, the problem for the many UAVs being used for monitoring and tracking during military reconnaissance purposes will be testing the amount of data fusion taking place.” Ian Matthews, NI's UK area sales manager agrees. He feels that customer protocol testing has become a key area of concern because UAVs will have many new facets of technology embedded in them, such as fly by wireless systems for example. “Data fusion is a key area - particularly when test engineers start dealing with different technologies like video, sensors and RF communications that make up the UAV's payload. It's for this reason that FPGA-based tools are becoming more popular and many of our partner companies in the mil/aero sector are adopting our RIO FPGA-based software platform for customised sensor testing, purely because they have no idea what kinds of sensors they will be dealing with in the future. They can't make any large investments in one particular type of test system because they may change as new sensors are developed. FPGAs are ideal for this situation because they provide the speed of processing without the fixed personality of traditional ASIC-based instrumentation.” In summary, aerospace design methods are becoming increasingly data intensive and require more demanding flight test methods. With the primary goal of accurately validating numerical models during flight test, for many test engineers, the mantra has become: predict, test, evaluate. www.ni.com/uk/milaero

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