Pneumatic distortion compensation for aircraft surface pressure sensing devices

In this paper a technique of compensating for pneumatic distortion in aircraft surface pressure sensing devices is developed. The compensation allows conventional pressure sensing technology to obtain improved unsteady pressure measurements. Pressure distortion caused by frictional attenuation and pneumatic resonance within the sensing system makes obtaining unsteady pressure measurements by conventional sensors difficult. Typically, most of the distortion occurs within the pneumatic tubing used to transmit pressure impulses from the surface of the aircraft to the measurement transducer. This paper develops a second-order distortion model that accurately describes the behavior of the primary wave harmonic of the pneumatic tubing. The model is expressed in state-variable form and is coupled with standard results from minimum-variance estimation theory to develop an algorithm to compensate for the effects of pneumatic distortion. Both postflight and real-time algorithms are developed and evaluated using simulated and flight data. Covariance selection and filter-tuning examples are presented. Results presented verify that, given appropriate covariance magnitudes, the algorithms accurately reconstruct surface pressure values from remotely sensed pressure measurements.