An Integrated Real-Time Turbine Engine Flight Test System

Abstract

New developments and modifications to existing gas turbine engines require qualification through extensive ground testing followed by flight testing. An increasing work load necessitates productivity improvements in the test platform utilization and the telemetry ground station. This paper addresses the application of a compatible family of commercial offthe-shelf telemetry systems for quick-look to ensure data integrity on board the Boeing 720 test platform, and a distributed architecture ground station to serve multiple engineering disciplines through the use of an acquisition subsystem serving data to independent color graphics workstations via an Ethernet local area network.