Newsletter: September 2017 - AUTOTESTCON Issue

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AgustaWestland Uses VXI Platform to Test Helicopters in a Wind Tunnel Simulation

Submitted by Bustec

Company: AgustaWestland

Industry: Transportation/Aviation

Challenge: Acquiring data from 128 channels simultaneously at a rate of up to 100 kS/s while maintaining the ability to monitor time domain data online in real-time and store all data continuously onto a RAID system.

Solution: Using the Bustec VXI platform to quickly collect data with superior analog performance, versatile signal conditioning, and the capability for on-the-fly system calibration.

AgustaWestland creates integrated helicopter systems that encompass all principal weight categories for commercial and military use. These helicopters must be tested extensively to ensure complete customer satisfaction upon delivery and use in a wide range of commercial and military missions. Because helicopter rotors are smaller than airplane wings, their vibrations contain higher frequency components, requiring sampling rates for helicopter rotors to be significantly higher than those required for airplane testing.

In the process of creating the Milano Wind-Tunnel facility to test new rotor configurations, AgustaWestland encountered a need for a top-of-the-line data acquisition system. Ultimately, AgustaWestland chose to use the ProDAQ 3180 ultra-performance motherboard together with the ProDAQ 3424 8-channel, 24-bit, sigma-delta analog-to-digital (ADC) function cards over a VXIbus backplane. Like many customers, AgustaWestland has an increasing need to capture the time domain data, along with frequency on vibration measurements.

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