Jewell Instruments makes it easy. We offer the best overall value in the industry. For many aerospace and industrial applications, our precision sensors are the perfect solution and our applications engineers will not be satisfied until your requirements are met.
Acceleration Solutions
Flight Control & Guidance
To meet demanding contemporary aircraft performance requirements, Flight Control and Guidance Systems compute and display aircraft position and orientation while executing many routine adjustments to attitude and direction in the course of a flight.
Accelerometers for flight control applications require high accuracy, exceptional reliability and conformance to stringent qualification standards such as RTCA DO-160. LSMP Series accelerometers with 100,000 hour MTBF reliability and up to 20g full scale sensing range are critical components detecting longitudinal, lateral, and normal accelerations for aircraft wind shear detection, AHARS and autopilots worldwide. The Jewell LCF-500 Series is another product specifically designed to yield a combination of high accuracy and ruggedness in numerous applications including Aerospace. This inertial sensor moving system is supported by a taut-band torsional suspension, which is floated in a silicon damping fluid and provides peak performance and exceptional signal stability.
Fatigue Monitoring
Repeated stresses applied to a structure produces failures that would not be caused by a single load application. Structural fatigue is often the factor that determines the life of an aircraft, and aircraft of a given type can fly totally different profiles to perform the same mission. As a result, there is a need to determine the magnitude and number of airframe acceleration exposures for each aircraft.
The LCA-100 Series accelerometer with resolution better than 10 micro g and MIL-STD qualification is designed for aircraft fatigue monitoring. This is a taut-band design with better repeatability, has connector termination and it’s DO-160 approved for aerospace applications.
Image Stabilization
Active image stabilization for vision and target acquisition systems requires precisely accurate inertial sensors to minimize the errors caused by sensor noise, bias, or phase delay. Jitter reduction is accomplished by measuring the vision or target acquisition system motion, and applying a physical position or pilot/operator display correction using sophisticated signal processing techniques.
Jewell’s unique wide bandwidth ASXC angular accelerometer is a vital component for military image stabilization and aviation flight control. The ASXC incorporates force balance fluid rotor technology to achieve a high-level angular acceleration output with unrivaled accuracy, stability and linear acceleration rejection
Tilt Solutions
Stability Augmentation
Aircraft flight performance dynamics can be inherently minimally damped or unstable as the result of numerous factors including aircraft configuration, flight speed, altitude and intentional design characteristics chosen to achieve rapid changes in aircraft attitude and direction. Stability augmentation systems using inclinometer inputs modify the aircraft’s inherent performance by automatically adjusting the flight control surfaces, thereby safely reducing pilot workload.
The LSOX Single-Axis Analog Inclinometer series are a rugged, high precision tilt sensor designed for peak performance in extreme conditions. These RoHS compliant sensors feature a fluid damped mechanism to deliver superior noise rejection in high shock and vibration environments as well as excellent output stability. Another sensor solution is the JDI-100/200 with better accuracy than other MEMS sensors, and the JDI-100/200 includes temperature compensation, signal averaging, and offers several termination options.
Aircraft Manufacturing Equipment
To ensure that every aircraft is constructed just right, a manufacturer needs reliable equipment. An inclinometer can be implemented into manufacturing equipment to provide precise control and automation.
An inclinometer with the resolution of +/-0.001° is often needed for feedback to control angular displacement during testing. The LCF-300 has a resolution of 1 microradian and is fluid-damped to filter out noise and vibration from its readings. The damping feature is needed to reduce the crosstalk and low-level vibrations emanating from the test figure. The Jewell LCF-300 Series flexure suspension servo fluid damped inclinometer is a ±1° to ±90° device designed for applications where high levels of shock and vibration are present. LCF-300 units are characterized by excellent turn on repeatability and very low hysteresis.
Another sensor solution for Aircraft Manufacturing Equipment is the biaxial LCF-2330 series which is a new fluid-damped servo design that uses an optical module with improved performance. The main advantages are less susceptible to circuitry noise, smaller footprint, better performance over temperature, 4-20mA output is also available.
Stall Warning
Aerodynamic stall occurs when an aircraft angle-of-attack increases until further increases produce less lift and significantly more drag. A pilot stall warning must be given with sufficient margin to prevent stalling under any anticipated flight condition. The stall alarm is typically conveyed by the use of both audio and stick-shaker means.
When approaching an angle-of-attack potentially resulting in an aircraft stall, the Jewell LCF-300 Series flexure suspension servo fluid damped inclinometer is a ±1° to ±90° device designed for applications where high levels of shock and vibration are present. LCF-300 units are characterized by excellent turn on repeatability and very low hysteresis.
Control Surface Alignment
During aircraft production, the relationships between manual flight control inputs and an aircraft’s resultant control surface movements must be accurately calibrated for both conventional mechanical, hydro-mechanical and fly-by-wire flight controls. The control surfaces must move precisely as the aircraft design engineers intended, so that the aircraft responds safely and predictably to the pilot’s or flight control system’s direction.
The LSOX-DC with a +/- 45 degree range inclinometer combined with DSI-1000 inclinometer digital readout are essential components for control surface synchronization on multiple aircraft and the Space Shuttle orbiter re-entry vehicle. The rugged LSOX can be repeatedly moved between vehicles and control surfaces with no loss of accuracy if it is accidentally mishandled. The DSI-1000 offers 0.001° digital display resolution, operator selectable tare, and inclinometer output comparison capability.
