Design of LVDT for Aeronautical Jet Engines

Abstract

Modern aircraft systems mainly uses electronic instruments which plays a crucial role to know the position of different control surfaces. Generally, transducers and sensors are used for this purpose, Linear Variable Displacement Transducer (LVDT) transducers are mainly used. The most important characteristic of an aircraft is its ability to control the angular velocity this is called thrust vectoring also known as gas-dynamic steering. Thrust vectoring makes the aircraft highly maneuverable at low speeds and capable of near-zero airspeed at high angles of attack without stalling. The key requirement for this is knowing the position of the control surfaces on the engine nozzle, the device for this is a LVDT. One more the most challenging is sensing the position of the thrust nozzles for thrust vectoring due to high temperature variation during flight. This paper describes the design of the LVDT for the thrust vectoring application and provides the concept to making the LVDT temperature invariant.