Both the Vibration & Acoustic department and the Structure department of airbus Toulouse are long-time customers of LMS. Two years ago they began using LMS CADA-X Time Data Processing (TMON) to process in-flight data. Recently, they called upon LMS to develop a customized solution to help them to slash the time of in-flight data analysis.
Flight-testing is a costly and time-consuming part of aircraft development, and it is important to be able to acquire as much data as possible during flight. A bank of seven SONY SIR-1000 instrumentation recorders gives Airbus the ability to acquire data at a sample rate of 48kHz on up to 224 channels at a time for a flight duration of a couple of hours. Because each flight has1many different test scenarios to measure, a purpose-built control unit is used to switch appropriate transducers to the recording system and to encode ancillary data, such as test details (date, aircraft type and number), pseudo-static data (airspeed; roll, pitch, and yaw angles; temperature and pressures) and an IRIG-B absolute time stamp onto the recording. Back on the ground, this avalanche of data is digitally transferred into TMON ready for processing.
The decoding of the ancillary channels, followed by data reduction, is handled by the special development in LMS Streamline Processing. Typical processing can vary from the traightforward level enveloping every few milliseconds, through advanced digital filtering and octave analysis, to an operational model analysis of the structural vibrations occurring during a maneuver. The data are always shown against absolute time on the x-axis. The flight tapes are retained for archiving purposes, however the ancillary data headings are stored within the LMS system. Whenever anyone within Airbus requests another type of analysis on a specific test scenario the system can be interrogated to quickly find the appropriate tapes. These are then reprocessed and the results transmitted to the requesting engineer using LMS Reporting Seat. The Project Leader in the Vibration & Acoustic Department commented, “TMON has proved itself as an invaluable tool for in-flight data processing. The special development will enable us to save 50% of the time it used to take to process our data.”
Flight-testing is a costly and time-consuming part of aircraft development, and it is important to be able to acquire as much data as possible during flight. A bank of seven SONY SIR-1000 instrumentation recorders gives Airbus the ability to acquire data at a sample rate of 48kHz on up to 224 channels at a time for a flight duration of a couple of hours. Because each flight has1many different test scenarios to measure, a purpose-built control unit is used to switch appropriate transducers to the recording system and to encode ancillary data, such as test details (date, aircraft type and number), pseudo-static data (airspeed; roll, pitch, and yaw angles; temperature and pressures) and an IRIG-B absolute time stamp onto the recording. Back on the ground, this avalanche of data is digitally transferred into TMON ready for processing. The decoding of the ancillary channels, followed by data reduction, is handled by the special development in LMS Streamline Processing. Typical processing can vary from the traightforward level enveloping every few milliseconds, through advanced digital filtering and octave analysis, to an operational model analysis of the structural vibrations occurring during a maneuver. The data are always shown against absolute time on the x-axis. The flight tapes are retained for archiving purposes, however the ancillary data headings are stored within the LMS system. Whenever anyone within Airbus requests another type of analysis on a specific test scenario the system can be interrogated to quickly find the appropriate tapes. These are then reprocessed and the results transmitted to the requesting engineer using LMS Reporting Seat. The Project Leader in the Vibration & Acoustic Department commented, “TMON has proved itself as an invaluable tool for in-flight data processing. The special development will enable us to save 50% of the time it used to take to process our data.”
