Top test for Airbus helps get products to market faster and right first time

In the digital age, ensuring the success of a product is difficult; vast data is needed to even begin to understand what market forces might pose a threat at a given stage of the product's lifecycle. Added to the economic environment of global recession, anxious investors and globalisation, the current world is not an easy place for product design engineers or project managers. Risk is potent, increasingly unpredictable and, arguably, higher than ever. This rings more true for some sectors than for others, particularly those requiring the most investment in terms of time, money and resources. A key example, of course, is aerospace in which the development stage often runs into several decades. Globalisation, in particular, creates new pressures on the current industry giants. According to Boeing, by 2033 China is set to dwarf the United States, with the market over the next two decades valued at $870bn. Expansion into these markets may be lucrative but will also serve to increase costs for the Western OEMs, particularly in the context of fierce competition from home grown low cost manufacturers such as the Chinese state-owned Comac. A method to mitigate against such circumstances is to maximise efficiency in all stages of a product's development thereby competing in terms of cost and time-to-market. System level integration testing is often the critical point in the development of any large and complex product. Incompatibilities, bugs, safety issues and validation problems can hinder time-to-market objectives and have serious implications in terms of cost. It is therefore an area where making improvements that help achieve high level system maturity as early as possible in the product lifecycle will bring considerable benefits. The use of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) is becoming increasingly prevalent in many technology-based sectors. In simple terms, HIL simulation allows for physical components or systems to be tested within a simulated parent system environment. This technique permits the integration of a system in effect to be tested prior to actual, physical integration. The advantages of this span cost, time-to-market and safety. Having been conceptualised 15 years ago, HIL is not a new technology but it is being applied with a level of innovation not seen before. One example is Spherea Test & Services' U-TEST solution. The company has put U-TEST to the test on the largest of stages with the Airbus A350 programme. In this case, U-TEST was used as a HIL solution for actuators within the landing gear system. An aircraft's landing gear is a complex and highly integrated, mission-critical sub-system. Integral to the design process is predicting and validating the failure rate within the environment in which it will be operational. For Airbus A350, testing of the actuators began at simulation stage, with the actuator as a synthetic component within a synthetic aircraft. The bench then evolved to include physical instrumentation and measurement equipment 'into the loop'. This progression continued in tandem with the development of the Unit-Under-Test (UUT) until eventually a physical test rig was built. The rig, controlled by U-TEST, inflicted external parameters onto the actual product which were generated by the simulation of the rest of this aircraft. In effect, the subsystem's integration into the parent system was tested prior to actual integration. This ability to evolve an integration test bench in parallel with the development of a product offers additional benefits. Primarily it makes the bench more cost effective because it creates an opportunity for expanded use and limits the need to heavily modify. Secondly, it creates continuity within an organisation's test activities - feasible due to the open (e.g. Linux and Eclipse) and modular features of the solution. Matt Farrelly works for Spherea Test & Services.