Development of an automated helicopter stability & control flight testing data collection and analysis software system

This thesis presents the software system developed to collect, present and analyze helicopter stability and control flight test data near real time inflight. The software system is designed to be relatively simple to operate. The functionality of the program is presented in detail with example screenshots of each window in the entire program. The procedures for use of the program are presented in a step-by-step fashion that could serve as the basis for a user\u27s manual

Heat-Cleaned Nextel in MMOD Shielding

Meteoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) shielding can include NextelTM ceramic cloth in the outer layers of the shielding to enhance MMOD breakup. The Nextel fabric can contain size (or sizing) which aids in manufacture of the fabric. Sizing is a starch, oil or waxy material that is added to the rovings and yarns to protect the fibers from being cut or broken during the fabric manufacturing process and by later handling. For spacecraft applications, sizing is removed by heat-cleaning to reduce/eliminate off-gassing during vacuum operations. After the sizing is removed, the fibers in the woven fabric are prone to breakage during handling which reduces fabric strength. Because heat-cleaned Nextel tends to shed fibers that can be irritating to workers, the usual practice for hypervelocity impact tests is to use Nextel with sizing. The reduced strength of heat-cleaned Nextel does not typically effect the performance of MMOD shields with Nextel used in outer layers of the shield, because the density and areal density of the ceramic fibers in the fabric control MMOD breakup (not fabric strength). This paper provides data demonstrating that hypervelocity impact protection performance is not adversely altered for shields containing heat-cleaned Nextel compared to Nextel with sizing

Data driven nets: a maximally concurrent, procedural, parallel process representation for distributed control systems

technical reportA procedural parallel process representation, known as data-driven nets is described. The sequencing mechanism of the data-driven representation is based on the principle of data dependency. Operations are driven into action by the arrival of the required working set of input operands. Execution of DDN processes is side-effect free, and influence in the net representation is transparaent. Data-driven nets have several advantages over many of the existing parallel process representations. These nets are capable of representing parallelism below the statement level, and in addition may be arbitrarily pipelined. Data-driven nets are simpler than other data-flow schema in that no distinction need be made between control and data. A process model for data-driven nets is given and a number of properties of the model are discussed. The operating rules for data-driven nets are completely asynchronous and the nets therefore serve as an excellent low-level process notation for distributed systems