WILDCRAFT

Wireless Smart Distributed end System for Aircraft

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'WILDCRAFT proposes the design, development and testing of a proof-of-concept demonstrator of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) aimed at applications in the aerospace industry. The continuous pressure on aircraft manufacturers to produce better and more secure aircrafts has led to increasing costs in maintenance and monitoring procedures that are being performed at given time intervals to assess the state of an aircraft. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) allows the continuous monitoring of critical variables of the operation of an aircraft, and as such they are able to issue early warning of a possible problem for immediate repairing. WILDCRAFT is paying attention to data fusion techniques needed for obtaining an “abstract sensor” from the measurements taken by a multiplicity of sensors deployed in a specific part in an aircraft. To that end we are going to study the most suitable algorithms to infer, estimate or summarize the state of the physical variable being measured. The designed algorithms will be implemented in a FPGA platform. In WILDCRAFT we are also considering the safety critical nature of any on-board system in an aircraft. The set of safety requirements of the system will be compiled and used for the specification, design and development of the building blocks of the system: sensors, energy harvesting, RF transceiver and microprocessor, and the corresponding levels of software and programmable hardware blocks.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

A new health management solution acts as a 'virtual' maintenance team, determining the status of an aircraft and its subsystems to supply actionable information and help aircraft operators.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Integrated vehicle health monitoring of aircrafts is needed to enhance flight safety and at the same time reduce operational and maintenance costs. However, a series of constraints prevent the incorporation of such instrumentation onto aircraft. The size, resources and energy required were addressed by the EU-funded project 'Wireless smart distributed end system for aircraft' (http://www.wildcraft-eu.org/ (WILDCRAFT)).

By developing a wireless sensor network based on data fusion techniques for the analysis of measurements taken in specific parts of an aircraft, WILDCRAFT has made it possible to detect anomalies with greater confidence. Researchers have developed an end-to-end solution for collecting, analysing and producing actionable information.

The wireless sensors chosen for the health monitoring system work well in a range of temperature, acceleration and humidity conditions. They are relatively small in size and weight as well as energy efficient. Furthermore, a thermal harvester eliminates the need to charge batteries by harvesting electrical power generated by the temperature difference with the surrounding air.

Wireless connectivity links every sensor to a central computation node consisting of a network-enabled processor with high-performance cores and a complete set of peripherals. Although capable of processing large amounts of data, a field-programmable gate array has been added to accelerate certain very demanding tasks.

With the recorded data and newly developed data fusion algorithms, the WILDCRAFT system can identify the exact state of the aircraft structure. Taking advantage of various levels of data redundancy allows obtaining high-fidelity virtual sensing information. More importantly, the new system plays to the respective strengths of different types of sensors.

The current practice of scheduled maintenance increases the cost of maintenance, especially in the case of aircraft flying beyond their designed service life. Condition-based maintenance that is now possible with the new WILDCRAFT health monitoring system will increase asset availability and return on investment while ensuring safety.