Method of measuring torque and torque measuring system for said method
AssigneeEurocopter Deutschland GmbH
InventorsAndreas Doleschel, Georg Wurzel
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method of measuring torque acting on a drive shaft (13) and a torque measurement system for implementing said method. Vibration sensors (18, 20) are attached to each of said main gearbox (11) and said tail gearbox (15) in order to detect gear mesh vibrations resulting from interaction of said drive shaft (13) with said main gear (12) and said tail gear (16), said detected gear mesh vibrations being transferred to an evaluation unit (19) for analysis.
Claims5
A method of measuring torque at a drive shaft, particularly at a helicopter's tail drive system, comprising at least a main gear in a main gearbox, and at least a tail gear in a tail gearbox, said drive shaft being arranged for transmitting torque between said main gear and the tail gear, said method comprising the following steps:
- providing at least two vibration sensors with at least one of said vibration sensors being attached to each of said main gearbox and said tail gearbox,
- applying torque to said drive shaft,
- detecting the vibrations related to gear mesh vibrations resulting from interaction of said drive shaft with said main gear by means of one at least first vibration sensor attached to said main gearbox,
- detecting the vibrations related to gear mesh vibrations resulting from interaction of said drive shaft with said tail gear by means of an at least second vibration sensor attached to said tail gearbox,
- communicating the vibrations detected by means of the at least one first vibration sensor to an evaluation unit,
- communicating the vibrations detected by means of the at least one second vibration sensor to the evaluation unit,
- acquiring data related to the gear mesh vibrations communicated from the at least first vibration sensor to the evaluation unit,
- acquiring data related to the gear mesh vibrations communicated from the at least second vibration sensor to the evaluation unit,
- bandpass filtering said separately acquired data for each of said first and second vibration sensors separately,
- extracting separate phase information from said data filtered separately for each of said first and second vibration sensors,
- detecting the phase difference from the separately extracted phase information from each of said first and second vibration sensors,
- computing the rotations per minute for the drive shaft from the extracted phase information from said data filtered separately for each of said first and second vibration sensors, and
- computing the torque applied to the drive shaft from the phase difference computed from the separately extracted phase information for each of said first and second vibration sensors.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.