Approach of Flight Testing of an A320 using Integrated Plug & Play Telemetry based GCS to Remote Engineering (IoT based) Kai Binnewies 1, Ali Baghchehsara 2*, Jan Robbe 3, Amine Boughalem 4 1: Test Engineer, VDev Systems and Services, Otto-Lilienthal Str. 29 – 2nd floor, 28199 Bremen, Germany 2*: R&D Engineer, VDev Systems and Services, Otto-Lilienthal Str. 29 – 2nd floor, 28199 Bremen, Germany
[email protected] 3: Project Leader, VDev Systems and Services, Otto-Lilienthal Str. 29 – 2nd floor, 28199 Bremen, Germany 4: System Engineer, VDev Systems and Services, Otto-Lilienthal Str. 29 – 2nd floor, 28199 Bremen, Germany Abstract: This research is studying comparison of structural flight test done via portable telemetry Ground Control Station (GCS) vs. previous GCSs utilized an IoT framework for a FT. The flight test which took place in middle Germany implements different variables and fixed costs in (e.g. building a GCS, sending engineers over the mission area). The test however took place using a portable GCS, and here analysis focuses on time, costs, and different advantages and disadvantages of this GCS compared to the previous practices, and approaching Remote Engineering platform, using IoT is examined. Keywords: Telemetry, Flight Test of A320, Flight Testing, Portable Telemetry, Integrated Remote Engineering 1. Introduction The purpose of testing aircraft is collecting data from different systems and their behavior during flight or on ground under specified circumstances. i.e. for airworthiness proof of concept. The portable plug and play telemetry system was implements a planar antenna which transfers parallel chains of input data to output data ports serially. Nevertheless, with tremendous advancement IoT, the system is being redesigned to use IoT with readable only outputs, and has been studied on ground. However, safety of the data is most critical especially concerning Flight Tests where sensitive test data is generated. Further study will be made for reliability reasons. Use of a VPN contributes to secured data transmission and. The costs for the test using telemetry was reduced by 200 thousand euros.
visualizer for Ground or Flight Test in the classical approach are shown in the figure 1.
Figure 1: Measurement System during test – Airbus A320 (Image Courtesy: VDev systems and Services, 2015)
“The flight test instrumentation is split into 4 levels: Level 1: sensors and tapping of aircraft parameters - Level 2: Data acquisition units (DAU) to acquire analog (temperature, pressure, acceleration, voltage, etc) and data from avionic buses. - Level 3: Data merging from the DAU using Ethernet switches. - Level 4: User devices like Recorders, Telemetry transmitter, Real time data processing.” [1] Level 1 Instrumentation in this test is mainly analog sensors for measuring static pressure and air flow. Furthermore, temperature sensors of type PT100 are installed. These analog parameters are complimented by data from the aircraft sensors that is received by tapping an ARINC429 bus line.
2. Testing & Telemetry This test specifically is to measure set of data using analog sensors to collect pressure data of Air-conditioning system - ATA 21 ducting in an Airbus A320. 2.1 Testing For collecting the data, there are several instruments necessary, which mainly are measurement system, sensors, telemetry device, and visualizer (computer). Onboard of the aircraft, the measurement system and
Figure 2: Pressure Sensors during test – Airbus A320 (Reference: VDev systems and Services)
ETTC 2017– European Test & Telemetry Conference
2.2 Telemetry The total collected data flow is about 2 to 5 Mbit per second. Most sensors are used on a sample rate of 100 to 1000 per second. Parameters are either directly stored or used for computation of other parameters. Due to different purpose of the test, monitoring the collected data on ground demands transmission of the data, which shall be done via telemetry. As of being in automatization and digitalization era, science and technique of automatic measurement and transmission of data by wire, radio or other means, also automatically. Therefore, Plug & Play device can be very useful either using remote sources as space satellites or Ground Receiving stations for recording and analytics. Figure 3 demonstrates conventional way of telemetry application in Aircraft testing industry.
Figure 4: Plug & Play integrated telemetry system (Image Courtesy: VDev systems and Services, 2015)
Onboard of the aircraft there is another plug and play trolley – the orange box - which is easily connectable to A/C systems either via ARINC or directly to the additional sensors. Compared to the conventional method, the GCS was offering a maximum tracking Speed of 60°/s using 20 dBi antenna gain which accordingly has consumed Power req. 150 W. 3. Vision- Remote Engineering IoT Based Flight Testing
Figure 3: Overview of Telemetry system in Aircraft Testing (Image Courtesy: VDev systems and Services, 2015)
As can be seen in this figure, there is a ground station which often is part of a building with stationary antenna on the roof top and a monitoring and processing room inside. The building can be used by numerous engineers that have possibilities to check parameters and data. Apart from the parabolic antenna, equipment like receiver, combiner, bit synchronizer, and several processing computers and displays are required. 3. New Development Concerning the necessary equipment for the ground station the size and weight has been remarkably reduced during the years. Thus, it is possible to have mobile ground stations with the same or slightly reduced capabilities. In the new approach, a van is equipped with a small planar antenna on the roof. Inside the van there is all necessary equipment to acquire, process and to store the received data. This solution enables flight test in any environment without large preparation time - so called Plug & Play telemetry for Flight and Ground test. Figure 4 demonstrates the overview of the described approach.
With today’s availability of internet and huge benefits of Internet of Things (IoT), the present invention is to employ the SATCOM to transmit critical data files during the Flight/Ground tests. Satellite telemetry is a powerful tool that enables highly migratory information to interact with the GCS. In such approach, the data are dynamically uploaded to the cloud service center and can be accessed from multiple ground stations on the cloud without the need of the equipped van close to the aircraft testing profile or area. This approach gives the test service result much more freedom of offering services also worldwide, and a revolution to designated test profiles. However, there is a concern of security which is being constructed via cognitive security robot system to save the flight/ground test missions and offer this freedom to testing industry. Compared to Remote Engineering and IoT, the data volume would instead be limited by the service provider which typically is higher than (Satellite upload speed max. 6 Mbps, download 20Mbps). On ground system designs in current telemetry applications carried by Airbus are primary receiving directional antenna with 26 dBi gain, alpha/beta tracker and possibility to connect with WTD61 ground station equipment. The backup data recording / post flight data can be replayed anytime after flight and mobile ground station can be used for remote campaigns. These data are connected using ISDN channel grouping (24+2ch). Cassidian sees the future telemetry applications to be moving from S-Band to C-band (5091 – 5250 MHz) in or after 2017. [2]
ETTC 2017– European Test & Telemetry Conference
However, Boeing tries to incorporate in-flight airplane information and relays it in real-time to maintenance data using SATCOM, but the telemetry problem has been always one of the bottle necks to bring AHM to reality. [3]
duration, safety related to security of data issues come up, which has to be evaluated within applicable standards which does not apply to Telemetry frameworks. [4] 6. References [1]
[2] [3]
[4]
Freaud, Gilles "A400M: Instrumentation Architecture for Flight Test", Chapter, UA, International Foundation for Telemetering Conference proceeding, 2017. Heiko Koertzel: " Datalink Applications – Flight Test Instrumentation ", CASSIDIAN, DGLR, 2013. JB Maggiore: " Remote management of real-time airplane Data ", Boeing Aero Magazine, Article 4, Year of conference. ED 202 " AIRWORTHINESS SECURITY METHODS AND CONSIDERATIONS7 ", EUROCAE, 2016.
Figure 5: IoT based Flight/Ground testing system (Image Courtesy: VDev systems and Services, 2015)
Figure 5 demonstrates the IoT based testing system which has mobile BoP (Break Out Panel) capability with integrated and Real Time data transfer. For functional testing and running real time simulation, this device offers integrated HMI Panel for manual and automatic testing, and connectivity to ARINC 600 Housing Box as A/C Interface. Technically speaking, A429 Analyzer (Reader and Data Replay with possibility for signal and bits manipulation) and also Signal short circuit, 28VDC. This system enables at the end is an expandable and modular DaQ Based on Real Time EtherCAT for Analog, discrete, A429, Synchro and LVDT. 5. Conclusion All in all, a portable plug & play GCS reduced the cycle time of structural flight test preparation and test set by 20 weeks on an Airbus A320 basis. Even though, the airborne was equipped with multiplexer transferring numerous single data streams into one PCM stream, the transferrable data volume was limited to 5 Mbps due to the limited bandwidth of the PCM stream. Meanwhile, C band has been implemented and the safely reachable range was 100 km, which can be unlimited using RE and IoT, as the GCS does not necessarily need to be close to the OPS area. But in contrast difficulties as ETTC 2017– European Test & Telemetry Conference
