Non-Contacting Torque Sensor for Helicopter Tail Rotor Drive Systems.

Torque pervades our everyday life, and without even thinking about it, we rotate or use products that rotate hundreds of times a day. The challenge in the present application is to be able to measure transient torque accurately, economically, andin a non-contact manner in a demanding environment. International Electronic Machines Corporation, which is an instrumentation and sensor development company with products in over 15 countries, proposes to perform a feasibility comparison of two innovativeapproaches which can meet the challenges of the present application and do not suffer from the shortcomings of present approaches. Based on IEM's preliminary calculations, these approaches will be able to provide all of the required performancespecifications. In Phase I of this project, IEM will evaluate the two approaches and further develop one of the two approaches. IEM will build a pre-prototype of the selected approach to demonstrate its performance. The output from the torque sensor willbe integrated into a fatigue monitoring approach. The potential applications include: transportation market, process control, machine monitoring