Understanding the impact of fatigue on an aircraft means integrating data collected from a huge number of sources.
And if you want a complete and useful picture of the aircraft’s durability, you’ll need every one of those data sources to be perfectly synchronised, so you can easily track how the aircraft responds to your stimuli over time.
That means perfectly synchronising data from hundreds – or even thousands – of strain gauges. Plus there’s all the data that test engineers now glean from techniques like digital or thermal image correlation. To get the most accurate picture, you’ll want this synchronisation to be accurate to within a millisecond, at the very least.
The challenge is that running these tests means using equipment from a potentially huge range of vendors, all of whom might have different standards for synchronising data. Not to mention the amount of time and stress involved in running around constantly checking that your sensors are aligned.
The best DAQ solutions can remove this stress almost entirely, making it easy to synchronise data points across a wide range of data sources. They’ll help by:
- Making it easy to integrate external data sources with your DAQ system. Look for a solution that is open for data from the sources you use most often, easily matching up, for example, sensor readings with digital images so you can see exactly what was happening when the reading was taken.
- Allowing you to feed data seamlessly into simulation software, so you can update your aircraft’s FEM, validate numerical models, and pass insights on to other members of your team with ease.