Aircraft manufacturers carry out rigorous and comprehensive tests to ensure maximum safety for both civil and combat aircraft. Design engineers are facing a demand for more efficient or electric engines to meet noise and pollution specifications, while safeguarding high performance and reliability even under extreme conditions. But new propulsion systems require additional and comprehensive testing while time to market is short.
Any aircraft – and even more so the modern combat aircraft – is dynamically unstable to benefit its manoeuverability. This poses structural challenges that are exacerbated by the use of new materials. Expensive, large-scale tests on components, systems and the entire aircraft are needed to validate simulation models and physical prototypes and achieve airworthiness certification.
Advanced technology is pivotal to performing all these complex and expensive tests within a short time window. HBK is keenly aware of these challenges. Our integrated solutions reliably cope with aviation testing requirements and provide accurate, reliable results to support a “first-time-right” approach.
Electrification is a megatrend in all ground and airborne vehicles and has found its way into the aerospace industry. Electric aircraft propulsion systems have their unique design and measurement challenges as they push the limits of technology by going to higher voltages and frequencies. These systems are highly complex, requiring a high number of measurements and a large variety of signals to be acquired for initial validation and certification, efficiency and control testing.
We at HBK support our customers with initial research and validation of novel materials, components, and entire systems. The HBK all-in-one power testing solution integrates and synchronizes all measurements to ensure fast, accurate, and reliable testing.
Whether it’s determining material properties of components or the life expectancy of the entire aircraft by full-scale fatigue testing; whether it’s CAE-based simulation or physical ground vibration testing: Measuring dynamic and static aircraft behaviour under typical load conditions up to extreme events over thousands of test cycles is expensive and time-consuming. Only dedicated testing solutions and highly reliable equipment can manage these complex tasks and help engineers to use testing time and resources efficiently.
To achieve the certificate of airworthyness, any newly developed aircraft must be thoroughly tested. Zero failure of the whole flight control system and its components is a must. Airframe structures will undergo comprehensive tests to ensure top performance throughout their operational life. Ever more stringent noise regulations put pressure on manufacturers to design noise-driven airframe layouts with the smallest possible noise footprint. HBK’s dedicated solutions for flight system and airframe testing ensure compliance with international test standards and are approved for use in aircraft noise certification.
Propulsion systems such as jet engines are the main source of the overall aircraft noise footprint. Identifying sound sources and mitigating their impact is key in designing low-noise propulsion systems. The effect of vibration and other physical forces on the engine’s structural integrity need to be thoroughly explored. Typically, there is only a short time window to accomplish all these tests. HBK supports “right-first-time” engineering and supplies ultra-reliable, high-quality solutions for noise, vibration, and structural dynamics testing on propulsion systems.
