Test Vehicle Instumentation and Calibration

Spiral Technolgy's personnel develop, support, and operate Test Instrumentation Packages for flight research and flight test. Beginning with an analysis of the required measurements, our engineering and technical staff design and build custom instrumentation systems composed of all manner of sensors and transducers; custom and standard signal conditioning solutions, including circuit design and design of printed circuit boards; instrumentation system wiring designs; selection and specification of PCM and FM telemetry encoders, FM transmitters, and antennas - all the parts of an on-board downlink system - to meet the project needs.

Information from a variety of data busses (i.e. MIL-STD-1553, RS-422, IEEE-488, etc.) are interfaced to the PCM telemetry streams in combination with other measurements for display and monitoring in real-time and post-mission analysis.

Our support for calibration laboratories includes recommendations and guidance in systems used to calibrate flight research instruments. LabVIEW, the programming language by National Instruments, is used to control tests, read measurements, and present data in graphical or tabular form from flight research instruments. These instruments include electronically scanned multichannel pressure transducers, digital output high accuracy absolute pressure transducers, linear accelerometers, angular accelerometers, angular velocity sensors, and a variety of temperature sensors.

Spiral Technolgy's staff has unique experience in calibrating high-temperature structural sensors, in particular strain gages and thermocouples. Strain gage calibrations include the characterization of apparent strain, drift, and gage factor in a wide range of thermal environments using a variety of test equipment. Custom wire-wound strain gages and the evaluation of experimental strain gages across the temperature range from cryogenic to 2000ƒF. Extensive work has also been conducted in the development of techniques to attach high temperature instrumentation using thermal spray methods. Material to which instrumentation has been attached include superalloys, metal-matrix composites, and carbon-carbon composites used in hypersonic aircraft structures research.

A prime example of this support is the Engineering and Technical Services contract at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, where Spiral personnel support the test instrumentation needs of a wide variety of NASA flight research projects.