Do you like Toulouse or: How to make optical wing deformation measurements happen on large transport aircraft

Kurzfassung

Due to its significant impact to the aerodynamics of an aircraft, the deformation of wings and control surfaces is of high interest. The optical method IPCT (Image Pattern Correlation Technique) is a new advanced in-flight measurement technique that enables measuring the in-flight shape and the deformation of these elements in a non-intrusive way. The flight test instrumentation for the IPCT can easily be installed to the aircraft and the measurement procedure itself is quite simple. Within this contribution two IPCT measurement campaigns on large transport aircraft, namely an Airbus A380 and an Airbus A320 are presented. In the first part of the presented paper, the measurement technique IPCT itself and the required instrumentation are described briefly. The following main part of the paper focusses on the hardware integration and the flight test activities including the struggle with different challenges that appeared during the qualification and the tests such as sticking dot patterns and markers on the wing and keeping a calibrated camera system calibrated. Finally some measurement results and a list of lessons learned are given.