Publications
An automated approach to identifying sine-on-random content from short duration aircraft flight operating data
One challenge faced by engineers today is replicating an operating environment such as transportation in a test lab. This paper focuses on the process of identifying sine-on-random content in an aircraft transportation environment, although the methodology can be applied to other events. The ultimate goal of this effort was to develop an automated way to identify significant peaks in the PSDs of the operating data, catalog the peaks, and determine whether each peak was sinusoidal or random in nature. This information helps design a test environment that accurately reflects the operating environment. A series of Matlab functions have been developed to achieve this goal with a relatively high degree of accuracy. The software is able to distinguish between sine-on-random and random-on-random peaks in most cases. This paper describes the approach taken for converting the time history segments to the frequency domain, identifying peaks from the resulting PSD, and filtering the time histories to determine the peak amplitude and characteristics. This approach is validated through some contrived data, and then applied to actual test data. Observations and conclusions, including limitations of this process, are also presented.