Wireless Sensor Networks for Aerospace Applications—Thermal Monitoring for a Gas Turbine Engine

This paper reports on the development of a prototype wireless sensor network for thermal monitoring of aircraft gas turbine engines. The prototype acts as a concept demonstrator for the application at hand. Building upon the state of the art in the domain, the authors pursued a rapid prototyping approach, supported by a prototyping framework: FieldMAP. As a key property, the framework enables the conceptual shift from data to real-time, user relevant information, a feature that is less explored in the wireless sensor networks research. Consequently, an information extraction and visualisation component is put forward as an addition to traditional “sense and send” WSN systems. This component offers an intuitive approach to user understanding of the global evolution of the observed phenomena. Integrated within the prototype, the component makes use of the processing power available across the network coupled with interpolation algorithms borrowed from the geosciences domain. Reconstruction of field representations of the phenomena from the sparse sensed data allows identification of abnormalities and inference of their likely cause.