Automated testing of multiple redundant electrohydraulic servo-actuators and their test sets

Testing is an important activity in the design and development of any aircraft. Testing processes can be automated to reduce the diagnostic times and to improve accuracy, which results in faster detection of faults. Thus, higher throughput for testing the unit under test (UUT) is achieved. This paper is developed for automated testing of high performance, multiple redundant electro-hydraulic servo-actuators and their test sets through software with the help of data acquisition cards. Actuator test set (ATS) is special to type test equipment (STTE) used for testing the servo-actuators of a typical fly-by-wire (FBW) aircraft. At first, the testing procedure of ATS is automated before testing the servo-actuators by interfacing personal computer (PC) with ATS through digital to analog (D/A) and analog to digital (A/D) converters and then implementing pre-flight built-in-test (PBIT) algorithm on the servo-actuators through ATS which makes the evaluation and analysis of the performance of the servo-actuators easy and simple.