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A joint effort by a laboratory affiliated with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Sandia National Laboratories to improve aircraft safety was recently honored with the FLC Interagency Partnership Award. The award, which was presented for the first time at the 2007 FLC awards ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas, on May 17, recognizes the efforts of at least two different agencies for their successful collaboration transferring a technology. The team worked together to develop the Pulse Arrested Spark Discharge (PASD), a wiring diagnostic tool that can detect and locate a broad range of aircraft defects, such as breached insulation, chaffing, and physically small insulation cracks. Within an aircraft fuselage can be miles of aging wiring, intertwined within complex wire bundles, located behind the side panels. Failure of these wires can potentially cause serious safety hazards. The PASD finds the wiring faults, allowing mechanics to take corrective action before the fault develops into a serious safety hazard. Due to the simplicity of the PASD concept, the technology is readily implemented into a portable diagnostic system and can be applied to a number of aviation and non-aviation wiring systems. After concluding successful prototype testing, the FAA-affiliated laboratory, located at Atlantic City International Airport, N.J., and Sandia, based in Albuquerque, N.M., transferred the PASD technology to the private sector. It is now available as the ArcSafe® - AS1216 Arc Fault Detection System, developed and manufactured by Astronics Corporation, a Redmond, Washington-based company. Team members: Cesar Gomez and Michael Walz, FAA; Michael Dinallo, Steve Glover, R. Kevin Howard, and Larry Schneider, Sandia National Laboratories. |
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