Wiring System In-Situ Health Monitoring Diagnostics

Maintaining wire integrity of aging aircraft is an immense effort and cost for the military and commercial airlines. The Navy is reported to spend 1.8 million maintenance hours annually trouble shooting and repairing aircraft wiring. The development of an in-situ wire fault location system is critical to the solution to reduce cost, minimize downtime and improve safety. A key component of this system is an in-situ fault locating sensor utilizing sequence/spread spectrum time domain reflectometry (S/SSTDR) packaged in an inline connector for ground maintenance and in-flight diagnostics. The objective of this research project is to develop a Cable Access Packaging System (CAPS) including a high-density T tap (HDTT) interconnect that creates a three-way conductive “T” allowing signal coupling from aircraft wiring to circuitry to reduce the overall inline connection size for these sensors. Phase I demonstrated that high density mechanical and electrical packaging is critical technology for the sensor connectors to meet in-situ in-flight size and weight restrictions. The HDTT developed in Phase II represents the enabling technology necessary for the sensor circuitry to access the large quantity of wires embedded in aircraft cables for unobtrusive on board monitoring. The modular design and configurability of the interconnect to support a variety of connector sizes and pin counts makes on board aircraft wire monitoring applications practical and economical.