Getting the right information from the aircraft in real-time during flight is something that flight engineers and pilots want. A system that helps to minimize the effort of the flight engineer when analyzing hundreds of signals, or provides real-time information to the pilot about exceedances would provide significant benefits in flight test. To make this possible it is necessary to have rugged data processing hardware running advanced signal processing algorithms with feature extraction in real-time.
Critical Materials developed firmware for the Curtiss-Wright MAT/101 microcontroller to detect narrowband frequency harmonics using FFT techniques, generated appropriate alarms to the test pilot and pre-processed data to the flight engineer. Configurable parameters enable specification of frequency range and alarm thresholds. The system works in real-time with all the signal processing done on-board using the MAT/101 digital signal processor (DSP).
This case study discusses the challenge a Curtiss-Wright customer, a major flight test organization, had where they needed to implement a compact, rugged flight test system with real-time analysis running on hardware.
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