A stand-alone wireless Data System for flight acquisition of helicopter rotating components

Authors
E. Bianchi, AgustaWestland a Finmeccanica Company, Italy
E. Fosco, AgustaWestland a Finmeccanica Company, Italy
A. Colombo, AgustaWestland a Finmeccanica Company, Italy
V. Barraco, AgustaWestland a Finmeccanica Company, Italy
F. Vincenzo, AgustaWestland a Finmeccanica Company, Italy

Abstract

A successful flight test of a wireless data acquisition was performed on an Agu-staWestland AW109S helicopter. This self-contained system shows the potential to reduce flight test wiring complexity and time in preparation by eliminating cumbersome slip ring. Concerning with the acquisition from a rotating parts, a slip ring is one of the most used solu-tions, for its compactness, cost effectiveness and reliability. However, in some cases, the use of the slip ring is prevented by structural installations or not cost effective if only a limited acquisition parameters are required.

In these particular conditions a possible valid solution could be the implementation of a wire-less data acquisition system. Generally speaking, wireless is certainly one of the most promis-ing techniques for the future data system, even if nowadays this technology still needs further developments in order to improve the technical performances and reduce costs. Nevertheless, some wireless commercial solutions are available off-the-shelf and can be partially customiz-able for specific industrial application.

The mast vibration absorber (MVA) is a dynamic system installed on the main rotor hub, ro-tating with it, having the objective of reducing the in-plane components of the vibratory loads transferred to the fuselage and providing improvements in terms of flight comfort for the oc-cupants.

Since MVA installation was not compatible with slip ring mounting, an alternative solution for transmitting the signals from rotating to non-rotating system had to be implemented: the selected solution was the SG-Link® wireless strain node of MicroStrain’s Agile-Link™ wire-less data acquisition.

Moreover, concerning this development phase, the feature of real-time monitoring provided by the software used allowed checking the behaviour of the new installation during the flight, providing useful information about the safety of performed tests.

Afterwards, a flights campaign has been performed in order to acquire all information needed to certify this new installation and verify the effectiveness of a production-like system.
All the rotating system channels have been successfully acquired with the wireless data log and subsequently processed, as for “standard” instrumentation, in order to support certifica-tion process.