Customer
A worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of commercial and military helicopters.
Challenge
Perform simulated flight testing of aircraft health monitoring units (HMUs). Gather, align, compile, and resample real recorded signal data from various aircraft components, subsystems, and sensors. Synchronize the playback of all analog and digital data using a wide variety of hardware devices. Comprehensively monitor and verify HMU responses and analysis.
Solution
Bloomy provided a Flight Data Simulation System utilizing NI PXI hardware and components of NI DIAdem and LabVIEW. The system has a user-friendly interface for manipulating waveform data imported from recorded data files and for configuring the system for the desired hardware devices. The interface simplifies waveform editing functions, such as crop, copy, insert, offset, and repeat. With these edits, waveform data is grouped and aligned within created flight segments. The system compiles, synchronizes and plays back the data to multiple output hardware devices. The system contains an engine for parallel output of many different analog and digital signals including multiple avionic digital communication buses. The system’s software utilizes twelve execution threads to manage these hardware classes and coordinates and outputs data with proper buffering to ensure no skips in playback occur.
Features
- Imports data from a wide variety of sources, including recordings from Flight Control Computers (FCCs) and HMUs made during flight test, recordings from Systems Integration Lab (SIL) data acquisition systems, software-generated simulation data, as well as data created with the system’s built-in signal generation utility.
- Outputs 144 conditioned analog signals with multiple rates up to 100 kS/s simulating analog sensor data including accelerometers, strain gauges, RTDs, and thermocouples. Rate clocks are determined by the sample rate of the data passed through playback.
- Simulates a wide variety of digital signals including CAN, ARINC429, Data Distribution Service (DDS), Ethernet/JSON, and avionics-level discretes.
- Simplifies operator interaction with a custom user interface for many data gathering operations, including a signal generation utility to create additional signal data.
- Preprocesses, integrates, and compresses sets of data for future playback as entire test projects with a powerful data mixer.
- Provides synchronized playback of all signals accurate to one clock cycle of each adjusted rate clock using an accurately-timed playback engine.
Results
Bloomy’s Flight Data Simulation System analyzes critical HMU operations for efficiently validating HMUs under simulated flight conditions. The system provides the flexibility to process and synchronously play back data using a wide variety of hardware devices in order to produce the required mixture of signal types. The review of the HMU data collection validates the HMUs for flight testing.