Fatigue testing at Embraer: HBM goes samba...

Embraer is a leading manufacturer of civil and military air-craft, with its main manufacturing and test facility located in São Jose dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil.

Embraer ranks among the four largest commercial aircraft manufacturers in the world with a well established family of regional airliners, ranging from the 30 seat EMB 120 Brasilia turboprop to the 50 seat ERJ 145 jetliner. To complement the line, Embraer has launched theERJ 170 and ERJ 190 family, which covers a passenger capacity from 70 to 108 passengers.

HBM has provided the measurement system for the full scale structural testing of the ERJ 170 and ERJ 190. The test specimen is fitted with some 4000 strain gages for the determination of stress, strain and fatigue characteristics of the aircraft.

HBM´s turnkey measurement solution offers Embraer the capability for simultaneous and parallel measurement of over 4000 channels of data, as well as a software package for the post acquisition analysis of the measured data.

The Embraer measurement system is based on HBM’s MGCplus high quality 20-bit resolution data acquisition system. It features synchronous analog to digital converters for every channel. Synchronous A to D conversion assures that the data acquisition is performedwithout sampling skew. Furthermore, as no multiplexing is carried out, there is no settling time the between sampling of different channels.

catman® software from HBM is used for setting up the measurement tasks, data handling, data post processing and data visualization. In addition, the catman® software distributes thetest data in real time to the networked client's PC to allow for multiple test data evaluation.

HBM offers state-of-the-art data acquisition and software measurement technology that meets the requirements of both static and dynamic structural testing. In addition, HBM´s solution offered Embraer a versatile system allowing easy re-configuration for other measurement projects.