Automated Vibration Level Assessment for Airborne Equipment

All equipment has to endure severe levels of vibrations in aircraft. Specifically, in Helicopters; rotor, engine and transmission are prevalent vibration sources. Consequently, there exist industry-based standards which set peak levels of vibrations that equipment has to be qualified for. During a flight test phase, the exposed vibration levels to which equipment is exposed to are to be monitored meticulously against any exceedance of specified qualification levels. In this study, a custom software tool is developed to automate the task of comparing equipment exposed vibration levels in flights as per equipment’s vibration qualification level derived from Section 8 of the RTCA DO-160 standard [1]. The tool which is based on open-source libraries, automated the manual and hence error-prone procedure. Analysis’ are performed mainly in two stages: APS for harmonic vibration perspective and PSD for random vibration perspective. Comparisons against a commercial spectrum analysis software are performed to validate the accuracy of the in-house developed tool’s frequency spectrum calculations before decorating this core with layers providing conveniences to users, for instance, vibration frequencies and levels from DO-160 and MIL-STD-810 [2] are embedded into the tool and are self-regulated based on the user input data. Results are automatically created as figures on which comparison levels are apparent. To increase the execution speed, the tool is modified so as to be run in a multitasking fashion, which leads to diminishing of execution time inversely proportional to the number of dedicated processes working in parallel. The resulting spectrum data is logged in a spreadsheet file. As a result, this study simplified and expedited equipment vibration level analysis which is an ensuing activity after each flight.