Key Fact
The system led to 12x increase in test throughput, benefiting the manufacturer and ultimately the consumer with a significant cost reduction.
Testimonials
“The test system ensured that all of our PCBS are properly tested prior to use and has significantly decreased our test time.”
Understand
Manufacturing flaws and reliability problems can cause mission changing or even catastrophic and fatal consequences as well as significant financial penalties in the avionics defence industry. To help mitigate this, original equipment manufacturers are required to perform HASS testing to ensure ongoing product quality and reliability by exposing latent defects in components and assemblies. HASS testing is a form of stress test for a product designed to improve reliability by characterising failures and using this information to improve on the design or manufacturing process. Temperature and vibration cycling are commonly performed during the HASS testing process.
The requirement to test three avionics RIO (Remote Input/Output) PCBs in parallel led to the employment of TBG Solutions. TBG Solutions is a National Instruments Gold Alliance Partner that specialises in providing bespoke automated production test and measurement solutions, system maintenance, customer training and support for a diverse customer base.
Engineer
The Test System
The test system performs 50,000 electrical tests including voltage, resistance, current, capacitance, frequency, phase and trip on three parallel units residing in a HASS chamber. The test system allows HASS profiles to be generated and executed, giving the operator the ability to exclude or include specific tests, adjust temperature/vibration levels and ramp rates. The fully automated parallel testing involves aircraft simulation, 2-part firmware download, highly accurate capacitance measurements and load trip testing.
The test system utilised a National Instruments PXI-8106 controller and PXI-1045 18 slot chassis with three PXI-4065 DMMs, a PXI-5105 Scope, Multifunction DAQ cards and various switch cards to allow extremely accurate, flexible and easy measurements. LabVIEW was used to create an interface driver for each instrument within the system and TestStand was then used to seamlessly sequence these drivers and other components together to create flexible test sections that could then be sequenced on the fly. TestStand has built-in parallelisation options and these were taken advantage of to test the three units as a batch, starting and ending the testing together.
The complete system was designed and built by TBG Solutions and TBG Manufacturing using CAD/CAM and National Instruments LabVIEW/TestStand
Figure 1 shows a CAD image of the test system with the National Instruments PXI hidden behind a panel accessible from the rear of the 2-bay 19” rack.
Benefits of the Test System
The test system not only tests three units in parallel but brings the individual test time for a single unit down from 3 hours using an existing system to 45 minutes. This provides a 12x increase in test throughput, benefiting the manufacturer and ultimately the consumer with a significant cost reduction.
Software tools provided with the system allow the user to change test sequencing/looping and HASS parameters such as vibration level, temperature level and respective ramp rates. This allows the customer to create a very specific test profile to try and replicate a real-world fault on a particular component. This moves the system away from a rigid test system and allows the customer to perform diagnostics, debug testing and R&D.
• Automated parallel test of multiple units
• 150 000 Individual tests
• Plane simulation
• Environmental chamber control with condition profiling
LabVIEW and TestStand provided such a comprehensive suite of easy to use functionality that the developers and designers were able to really focus on the best way to perform the tests on the unit rather than building the test executive. The team leveraged the functionality of LabVIEW and TestStand and other National Instruments products to provide a flexible, maintainable system, fit for purpose at the present and long into the future. Utilising these technologies allowed development of highly cohesive and loosely coupled tests increasing flexibility of test and reusability of software modules.
The final system successfully performs over 50,000 tests per unit under test in parallel whilst controlling the HASS chamber.
Deliver
LabVIEW and TestStand provided such a comprehensive suite of easy to use functionality that the developers and designers were able to really focus on the best way to perform the tests on the unit rather than building the test executive. The team leveraged the functionality of LabVIEW and TestStand and other National Instruments products to provide a flexible, maintainable system, fit for purpose at the present and long into the future. Utilising these technologies allowed development of highly cohesive and loosely coupled tests increasing flexibility of test and reusability of software modules.
The final system successfully performs over 50,000 tests per unit under test in parallel whilst controlling the HASS chamber.
