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Sandia Technology logo A quarterly research and development magazine.

Fall 2006
Volume 8, No. 3

SANDIA TECHNOLOGY

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Finding airplane short circuits before they cause trouble — continued

Pinhole size

Boeing 727 Inspecting electrical wiring in the wheel well of a retired Boeing 727 at Sandia’s FAA Airworthiness Assurance NDI Validation Center. The wing on the 727 has been removed. (Photo by Randy Montoya)
Sporadic short circuits occur where two exposed conductors, or a conductor and aircraft frame, make temporary contact during flight. Vibrations caused by turbulence may cause wires to touch, interrupting power to sensitive electronics and possibly damaging wires. These conditions are tricky to diagnose when the aircraft is on the ground because the shorting wires often have shifted back to a non shorted state. Sometimes these breaks can barely be seen by the naked eye because missing insulation may be the size of a pinhole and nearly invisible. Traditional wire-test systems have great difficulty finding these faults.

To overcome many problems besetting the promising technique, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Navy initially supported the research, followed by the Federal Aviation Administration, to the tune of about $2 million. It took two years for Astronics, of Redmond, Washington, to adapt it to its suite of tools, which were developed over years of research to locate wire breaches with the potential for electrical shorting.

Says Astronics team leader Mike Ballas, “We really value PASD technology. We licensed it, turned it into a practical portable test unit targeted for the aviation industry to find intermittent faults, and we believe it’s the best way now to do the job. It’s a nice complement to our patented technology.” “It would have been unfortunate if PASD had been developed and then remained stuck in a lab. Integration of the technique [with Astronics' ArcSafe technologies] is a real success story,” says Robert Pappas, FAA project manager for aging aircraft research and the first to recognize the value of Sandia’s original research proposal in 1998.