High Speed Rotor Head Mounted Instrumentation System

NASA Ames Research Center has been investigating the air flow of a rotor blade on a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter in-flight. This paper will address the hardware problems and solutions used to design and fabricate an instrumentation system on top of a UH-60 main rotor head. The instrumentation system consisted of 10 data systems operating in parallel and collected data from 370 sensors that are mounted in four rotor blades and on the rotating rotor head. The data was recorded on board the aircraft and simultaneously down linked to the ground station at 7.5 MHz.