Detection, location, characterisation and tracking of faults in Aircraft Wiring

Modern aircraft contain significant amounts of cabling linking flight critcal components &
systems all over the airframe. Current maintenance technology & techniques do not allow
flight operators & maintainers to accurately locate & classify faults to decide on a rectification
or a monitoring strategy. Time is spent removing panels to look for and assess logged faults,
chasing intermittent faults or searching for faults that may be causing reduced performance
due to damage but are not showing up as hard/permanent faults. The aim of this project is
twofold; firstly to act as a fault detection system to determine where a wiring fault is located
and what type of failure has occurred. This will enable a repair team to quickly find the fault
within the airframe and undertake a repair. Secondly the system is intended to allow the
aircraft operator to monitor ermergent or existing faults to decide the most appropriate time
for intervention, for example at the next scheduled aircraft maintenance period – critcially
moving from reactive to preventative maintenance of the aircraft Electrical Wiring
Interconnect System (EWIS).