AUTOMATION OF THE LYCOMING ENGINE TEST BED

Motivation and Need

We have automated the data acquisition mechanism for an existing manually operated helicopter engine test bed. In the past the data was not being logged and only the manual testing was possible by looking at the various electromechanical dials available to the operator. In this project, we have installed the new Labview based data acquisition system which takes the input of various transducers converting engine parameters like oxygen, vacuum, temperature, flow rate etc. into voltages and current

Furthermore, the engine performance analysis can also be conducted on this data. The original test bed contained mostly the mechanical type dials which were not suitable to interface with the modern industry standard hardware and software. We added new transducers to convert all the parameters into voltage and current form which can be easily interfaced with the modern data acquisition systems.

We used the PXI based data acquisition system from National Instruments. The graphical language Labview was used for making different PC based virtual instruments which connect to the real instruments and store and display the data acquired from the engine.

Current Progress

Principal Investigator
Dr S. M. H. Zaidi (Dean SEECS, Pakistan)

Graduate Researcher
Haris Junaid, haris.junaid@seecs.edu.pk