£3.3million wireless sensor project to begin

The project will enable the real time monitoring of critical components during flight and is joint funded by the UK Technology Board, as well as a number of leading companies from the aerospace industry. The WiTNESSS consortium has been designed to deliver a range of commercial application demonstrators based on the new system by the end of 2011. Work on the first prototype wireless sensing will begin next month. Designed to gather complex data from different parts of the aircraft makes the design of the whole system more sophisticated than existing wireless devices. The WiTNESSS system will be used to identify technical faults, optimise performance and monitor the overall health of the aircraft. According to iSLI, wireless is a key capability to reduce the costs associated with wired sensor cables. The three year project will initially see the system developed for lifetime maintenance functions, with a follow on potential for subsequent systems to look at predictive maintenance and real time data for safety critical components. Director of iSLI, Dr Mark Begbie, pictured, said: "The system will give aircraft operators the ability to detect and rectify problems before they lead to serious consequences so ultimately, these systems could make a significant impact on aircraft safety. If you take Rolls Royce as an example, when it is developing a new engine it can have upwards of 3000 sensors attached when it is on the testbed. Routing all the wires to the sensors and bringing them all back to a collection point is a big job and when you have got 3000 cables running over a vibrating engine, you get a lot of difficulty with dropouts. So Rolls Royce wants us to look at how the wireless technology can help."