Aircraft Wiring

Aircraft Wiring Fault Location and Reflectometry Methods (S/SSTDR, NDR, MSR, MCR, PD-FDR)

As wire ages, it becomes brittle and may crack and break. Locating these problems can take hours, days, or more, while expensive or mission-critical aircraft sit idle. Some faults are not reproducible on the ground and show up only in flight, often effectively grounding aircraft while maintainers struggle to replicate or find the problem. Arc Fault Circuit (AFC) Breakers are being designed to detect small arcs before they cause aircraft fires, yet once these breakers have averted disaster, they leave a maintenance nightmare for the technician tasked with locating and fixing the tiny damage within miles of wire snaking through the walls, floor, ceilings, and wings of the aircraft. Our research has created tools and sensors to locate these and other faults in aging wiring.

Publications by Topic

Algorithms

• E. Lundquist, J. Nagel, S. Wu, B. Jones, C. Furse, Advanced Forward Methods for Complex Wire Fault Modeling, accepted to IEEE Sensors Journal, 2012
• E. Lundquist, C. Furse, Novel Inverse Methods for Wire Fault Detection and Diagnosis, 2011 IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC/CNC/URSI Meeting in Spokane, WA July 4-8, 2011
• E. Lundquist, S. Wu, B. Jones, C. Furse, C. Lo, Aging Wire Fault Diagnosis Using Faster, Higher-Precision Methods, 2011 Aircraft Airworthiness and Sustainability Conference, April 18-21, 2011, SanDiego, CA
• Cynthia Furse, Chet Lo, Kevin Wheeler, Fast, Modular Wire Simulation Tools to Better Understand Small Wire Faults, 2010 Aircraft Airworthiness and Sustainment (AA&S) Conference, May 10-13, 2010, Austin, TX
• Chet Lo, Cynthia Furse, Modeling and Simulation of Branched Wiring Network,17th Symposium EMC-Zurich, Singapore March 2006

Photovoltaic System Fault Location

• Photovoltaic System Fault Location

2020

2019