Wireless sensor networks for aerospace applications- thermal monitoring for a gas turbine engine

The paper here reports on the development of a prototype wireless sensor network for thermal monitoring of aircraft gas turbine engines. The prototype acts as a concept demonstrator for the application at hand. Building upon the state of the art in the domain, the authors pursued a rapid prototyping approach, supported by a base prototyping framework - FieldMAP. As a key property, the framework enables the conceptual shift from data to user relevant information. Consequently, an information extraction and visualisation component is put forward as an addition to traditional “sense and send” WSN systems. The component offers an intuitive approach to user understanding of the global evolution of the observed phenomena. Integrated within the prototype, this component makes use of the processing power available within the WSN coupled with interpolation algorithms borrowed from the geosciences domain. Reconstruction of field representations of the phenomena from the sparse sensed data allows identification of abnormalities and inference of their likely cause.