A couple months ago, I proposed a new device to a customer, and they agreed. This week I helped to install and test it. It is a system to measure the thrust of an installed engine. That task is normally reserved for a test cell. This particular customer has no traditional test cell, but is doing heavy enough maintenance on his engines that a more in-depth test of the engine's performance may be warranted, at least according to some folks in the government. Anyway, the theory behind the system is based on using a strain gage instead of a load cell. There is a slight decrease in accuracy compared to a load cell, but it is still within reasonable limits of a half percent or less. There is a tremendous difference in cost between the system I designed versus a traditional brick & mortar test cell, which can run as high as $30M.
Anyway, we installed the system and did several tests with an engine that was run in a calibrated test cell. So we know that engine's performance characteristics. Now I am trying to make sure what we measured with the new system is accurately reflecting how the engine is running. It was pretty neat being in the cockpit of that aircraft, a B747, and watching the thrust readout change as the throttles were moved around. Sometimes its fun to be an engineer!
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The depth and accuracy of testing demanded by various government agencies has been in the news a lot recently, particularly with the regional commercial airline controversy. Would your device stand up to the FAA and NTSB criteria, at least for its intended purpose?
That is part of the acceptance testing being conducted by my customer. Repeatability and accuracy as well as correlation to existing performance data from a known engine are being accumulated prior to a demonstration in front of the FAA
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