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PDFTHE CHALLENGE
Prototyping and deploying a cost-effective, reliable control solution for a fire suppression system in a FedEx freighter aircraft within an aggressive deployment schedule.
THE SOLUTION
Developing an intelligent fire monitoring and suppression control system using NI LabVIEW software and NI Single-Board RIO hardware to keep planes safe from fires that may start in shipping containers.
The system monitors temperature and controls the suppression system to prevent fires on FedEx planes flying international routes.
At Ventura Aerospace, we created a fire suppression application for FedEx freight planes. In each plane, the fire control hub is the center of the system and responsible for checking safety interlocks, power distribution, and communication, while the fire control unit reads temperatures from 16 infrared sensors and processes and records the data. We designed the devices to be aircraft- and location-independent, fully autonomous, and require zero operator input as each unit continuously monitors its own health.
Using reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology, we prototyped our system with NI CompactRIO and LabVIEW and deployed our solution with NI Single-Board RIO, all in less than a year. We selected the NI sbRIO-9612 for the final solution because of its small size and low cost. Due to the common hardware architecture shared between CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO, the transition from prototyping to deployment was seamless.
– Jeremy Snow, Ventura Aerospace
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This article first appeared in the Q1 2009 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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