Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company’s site in Marietta, Georgia, is home to heavyweights such as the C-130 Hercules and the C-5 Galaxy transports – as well as the new super-agile F/A-22 Raptor fighter. The Structural Test Laboratory there is responsible for testing of these and many other aircraft, and over the years is generating an awesome amount of data.
“Increasing channel counts, higher sampling rates, and tracing vast amounts of data as they move between different departments and partner companies are just some of the factors driving laboratories in the aerospace industry to consider new approaches to structural test data processing and management”, said Marc Wood, Principal Engineer for Structural Test at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company. “After evaluation, we have chosen nCode as our supplier for these critical functions”.
A typical structural test for fatigue purposes is a huge capital investment, and it’s critical that the test rig be up and running all the time. Any events resulting in data errors, such as a transducer flat lining or being subjected to overloading, must be quickly detected and corrected to get the rig up again, not to mention preventing any data errors rippling through the organization. With a typical test involving 2000-4000 measurement channels that’s a challenge.
nCode have a comprehensive range of tools, such as an automated anomaly detection sequence – which not only identifies the more obvious problems such as drift, drop-out, spikes, and overloads – but also abnormal variances between channels and several other subtle test errors that can only be detected statistically. Validated data, including assessments of the cumulative fatigue damage can be uploaded to the departments that are waiting for this information immediately after each run – or periodically during long–term fatigue testing – shaving weeks off the existing process.
“Being able to quickly review 2000 or more channels of data is a minimum requirement”, said Marc, “but equally important to Lockheed Martin is an ability to automatically detect trends in acquired data that would indicate the onset of a potential structural failure.” nCode software will enable Lockheed Martin to keep tests running for longer periods with fewer inspection and repair downtimes – which is critical given that a loss of time in testing can be counted in many tens of thousands of dollars a day.
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