Wirelessness Reaches For The Skies

Aerospace development is a strategic industry within the British economy. It creates a lot of high value jobs directly and indirectly, while tremendous technological advances spin out of it. But there are other positive aspects to the sector that are all too often overlooked. We look at how one modest supplier has become a small part of the big picture. The Spitfire, Concorde, the Eurofighter Typhoon. All names to set a young engineer’s pulse racing. But like Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren Mercedes they are figureheads to an industry this is often unglamorous, hard-work, frighteningly competitive and economically challenged. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that Aerospace is an engineering industry just like any other. In reality is it just one piece in the jigsaw that is the national economy – all be it a very important one. Lots of engineers work in the sector their whole career, other take aeronautic developments and rework them for other uses. These are seen as the main technological and economic benefits of the industry. But there is another, equally important side that is almost always overlooked – mainstream engineers supplying their expertise and insight into the aeronautical sector! The aerospace boffins constantly learn from the more general engineering sector. For instance there is a long-running drive to improve productivity in design, test and manufacture. Aerospace’s performance in these disciplines has to date been woeful; they designed by government committee and build by hand. But techniques such as simultaneous engineering, design for manufacture, robotics and automation, in common use in many other industries, are now being adapted and adopted. The use and reuse of equipment and procedures is also becoming the norm, and one small company that has benefited hugely from this is Sensor Technology in Bicester. Commercial Manager Tony Ingham explains: “We make a torque sensor that uniquely is wireless. Instead of a fiddling about to install a complicated mess of slip rings, we just line TorqSense up with the shaft to be tested and use radio waves to capture the live performance data as it is generated”. “The Aerospace industry is very much one of our markets for TorqSense, so I was pleased when word got out and we now have an ever-growing portfolio of applications on both civil and military projects.” One of our first transducers was supplied for a simple test rig for British Aerospace. It must have been military, because nobody would confirm or deny anything! But this lead to a rather more open requirements, the reengineering for the Nimrod. In 2009 the new Nimrod MRA4 will replace the Nimrod MR2 which has provided sterling service to the military since the 1960s. The MR4A is a maritime reconnaissance and attack aircraft that can be configured for multiple roles, including submarine and surface warfare and search and rescue. TorqSense was instrumental in endurance and integration testing of the aircraft’s mechanical systems. The torque test rig is built around a reclaimed Nimrod MR2 fuselage, complete with operational landing gear, hydraulic system (including engine-driven pumps), primary and secondary flight controls. Flight forces are simulated by a sophisticated electro-mechanical system attached to the moving elements of the aircraft. Test data are gathered through a variety of sensors, which have to have as little effect on the system under test as possible. TorqSense, being non-contact, causes no drag whatsoever, so there is not even a need to allow for a constant offset when analysing the data. TorqSense uses two Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) devices which have embedded tiny ceramic piezoelectric combs. The SAWs are fixed onto the surface of the shaft under test and are excited to resonant and different frequencies. As the torque increases, the combs open and close which changes the reson

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