Advanced Instrumentation for Advanced Aircraft

Abstract

Advanced aircraft require sophisticated instrumentation system designs. New concepts incorporated in distributed data acquisition systems allow the flight test instrumentation engineer a selection of hardware with reduced size and weight, which requires minimal vehicle wiring between components. Improved accuracy and resolution are additional benefits of the distributed data acquisition systems described in this paper. These systems, currently being delivered by Aydin Vector for several major flight test programs, allow conditioning and encoding to be achieved near the sensors through a variety of remote units. The remote units for these applications differ as the measurement requirements and test program requirements differ. We will examine the distributed data acquisition systems used for several test vehicles and briefly describe vehicle for test program requirements which led to unique designs. The systems described for these applications are variations of the Aydin Vector ADAS-7000 System. The common element for these systems is the PMU-700 Programmable Master Encoder.