Generic Engine Health Monitoring / Control System

The Air Force is developing a wide variety of technologies for aircraft engine health management (EHM). Unfortunately, many promising new sensor technologies and new algorithms cannot easily be deployed for on-wing demonstration particularly for UAV health monitoring and control applications. IAC is developing a generic hardware and software system for the creation and fielding of low cost, integrated EHM / control systems. The system is based on a Xilinx Virtex-IV Pro™ FPGA and the VxWorks™ real-time operating system. It includes three general purpose CPUs. The MathWorks Simulink™ and Xilinx System Generator™ are used for algorithm development and validation of the integrated system operation. The prototype system includes 48 channels for input accelerometer data with a demonstrated sample rate of up to 196 kHz (8 channels digitized simultaneously), 8 tachometer channels, 16 analog inputs, USB, RS 232/485, ARINC 429, MIL-STD-1553, and Firewire busses. With super computer processing capabilities, the system can handle a wide range of range of on-board EHM possibilities. The system is being tailored for engine vibration monitoring (EVM) of the F117 engine. This system will also facilitate integration of third party EHM algorithms.