The Automatic Balance Calibration System (ABCS) was developed and produced by Israel Aircraft Industries. The inventor and principle person responsible for turning the concept into reality, Michael Levkovitch, is key to our ability to improve and update the ABCS to keep it current with the aerospace community's increasing requirements for a state of the art balance calibration system. The ABCS is capable of fully characterizing the coefficients of a six component internal strain gage balance in just a few hours. The advantage to automated loadings of the balance is the ability to fully calibrate the balance without repositioning or re-leveling the balance and the ability to reduce bias from the calibration process. The unique ability of the ABCS to apply any combination of loads allow it to apply any calibration loading schedule, including six component wind tunnel test load combinations to validate the performance of the balance in actual test type conditions. The ABCS has been kept in excellent operational condition through continual maintenance, upgrades and improvements as needed since it was first implemented in 1997 at the San Diego Facility. This paper will discuss the operation of the ABCS and recent improvements that increased the capability of the system to calibrate balances that are too large to fit within the original confines of the attaching hardware. This includes balance assemblies installed on a sting and large balances with internal air systems or balances that require multiple data channels that exceed the 9 channels that were originally available for balance data aquisition. The second part of the paper will cover the recent re-commissioning of the Large Load Rig (LLR) that is used for calibration of large balances with very high loads. The LLR was partially disassembled in 2006 to facilitate the move from the low speed wind tunnel to the new FMS facility. The recent calibration requirements, allowed the return of the LLR to full operational condition. We also incorporated a number of improvements of the control, safety and data acquisition systems. We will outline some of the tasks that were completed on the road to operational condition.
展开▼
