• View or download the VXIbus specifications including the latest version VXI-1 Revision 4.0.
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Airframe Testing

VTI Instruments

O v e r v i e w
A newly designed aircraft must be thoroughly tested before it can be flown. Hydraulic stress testing is a common technique for checking the strength and flexibility of wings, fuselage, propellers, and entire airframes. Tens or even hundreds of hydraulic actuators push and pull at an airframe to test for failures and materials fatigue that might occur under flight conditions. Strain is measured at hundreds of points to qualify test results.

P r o b l e m
To simulate actual test conditions, each actuator must be controlled independently yet synchronously with all of the other actuators. Actuator force must be updated many times per second to simulate dives and turns. To avoid destroying expensive prototypes, limit checks must be used to cut power to the actuators in case force or travel maximums are exceeded.

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Exploring VXI 4.0

By Tom Sarfi, VTI Instruments
Charles Greenberg, EADS North America Test and Services
Fred Bloennigen, Bustec

The popularity of the venerable VXIbus in large-scale ATE and data acquisition applications traditionally has been rooted in its stability that spans a 25-year history of product introductions. With the release of the VXI 4.0 specification, the VXI Consortium continues to offer customers a stable instrumentation platform that preserves backward compatibility. It also delivers exceptional performance enhancements that surpass comparable modular architectures for the application spaces it is intended to address.

The flexibility offered between a host controller and a mainframe is a clear differentiator that the VXIbus maintains over other modular instrumentation platforms. Over the years, system developers have communicated to VXI mainframes over GPIB, MXI/MXI2, and a variety of consumer-oriented buses such as FireWire, USB, and Ethernet. With a well-defined plug&play software architecture, end users have been able to upgrade their systems to the latest bus technologies with little or no impact to application code by simply swapping Slot 0 interfaces.

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