Publications

Flight environments demonstrator: Part I—experiment design and test planning

Owens, Brian C.; Mayes, R.L.; Khan, Moheimin Y.; Tipton, David G.; Zwink, Brandon R.

Flight testing provides an opportunity to characterize a system under realistic, combined environments. Unfortunately, the prospect of characterizing flight environments is often accompanied by restrictive instrumentation budgets, thereby limiting the information collected during flight testing. Instrumentation selection is often a result of bargaining to characterize environments at key locations/sub-systems, but may be inadequate to characterize the overall environments or performance of a system. This work seeks to provide an improved method for flight environment characterization through a hybrid experimental-analytical method, modal response extraction, and model expansion. Topics of discussion will include hardware design, assessment of hardware under flight environments, instrumentation planning, and data acquisition challenges. Ground testing and model updating to provide accurate models for expansion will also be presented.