ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Most helicopter programs require the acquisition of parameters from the rotating systems. Historically, these systems made use of electromechanical slip rings for the transfer of power, control, and data from within the helicopter's cabin to the rotating hardware. Slip rings are primarily used in dedicated instrumentation vehicles and are not commonly used in production platforms that may require instrumentation of the rotating systems for in-service load and fatigue monitoring. Additionally, the use of slip rings requires time and money to integrate the hardware and equipment into the aircraft in order to perform rotor data acquisition. The time needed to perform modifications to transmissions and drive trains plays a big factor in the increased costs of aircraft development. Less intrusive installations would minimize the need for mechanical changes and would improve the time needed to install the instrumentation. This paper describes a wireless system approach to perform the test without the slip ring, and provides performance data that validates this new method of instrumenting unobtrusively to save time and money without sacrificing data integrity.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Flight test data acquisition systems have been widely deployed in helicopter certification programs for a few decades. A data acquisition system uses a series of strategically placed sensors to provide instantaneous status condition of the helicopter's components and structure. However, until recently, it has been difficult to collect flight test data from helicopter rotors in motion. Traditional rotor solutions have used slip rings to electrically connect fixed and rotating mechanical elements; but slip rings are inconvenient to use, prone to wear, and notoriously unreliable.

This paper presents an open system architecture with wireless network centric telemetry and data acquisition over UDP/IP. This networked solution was designed and developed for iron bird and helicopter rotor applications which present a significant challenge for data acquisition and telemetry. Traditionally slip rings were used for data transfer however these result in issues with low bandwidth, electrical noise, installation complexity, and high maintenance costs. This paper describes a networked system using standardized technologies and protocols that was used for data acquisition and recording of parameters such as vibration, strain, and video on DAQ installed on the rotating part. The acquired data was transmitted in real-time via the network-centric wireless telemetry link which was synchronized with a ground-based DAQ used for real time processing of the rotor data.