Technical Workforce Needs for a New National Trisonic Ground Test Capability

Abstract

A trisonic ground-test capability is made up of three major components: infrastructure, processes, and people. In 2025 the capability built will have much different operating systems, technical processes, and technical data analysis needs than those required by today's workforce. This paper addresses what needs to be done to have the personnel ready with the appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities when a new trisonic wind tunnel comes online. 1 Test teams must, more than ever, follow sound system engineering principles in setting up test programs, executing them, and providing the needed knowledge to the programs being tested. To do this correctly requires the test team to understand in much more detail the needs of the program being tested and how the test results fit into the overall milestones of the program and to get involved early in program planning. The trisonic ground-test capability of the future will be much more automated than our current 50- and 60-year-old vintage facilities. Test teams will need to fully understand how computer-controlled systems affect the most optimum acquisition of required test results. Along with an automated test facility comes the need to apply statistically-based techniques to obtaining the data. The way we have ordered data gathering in the past will be significantly changed with highly automated facilities and statistical test planning. In addition to the typical on-body measurements of today, force balances and surface pressures, the facility of the future will have much more optical access for obtaining nonintrusive off-body measurements. Because the new test capability will have to support testing of both research programs and system development programs, teams will need to be able to change to meet differing needs and use rapid prototyping model construction in test designs. The best way to obtain data on the system under test in the future will be a combination of the strengths of computations, wind tunnels, and flight tests. Since wind tunnel test teams see many different programs during their careers, they are uniquely qualified to assist in analysis of the test data obtained. This is a radical departure from the recent history of treating wind tunnels as a rent-a-range and not allowing for data analysis by the team. The amount of data collected in this new capability will require improved techniques for knowledge management. In the future the speed of development will be increased so that much more emphasis on addressing operational needs early in the program will affect the types of data teams will be asked to obtain. The remainder of this paper gives more details on these future requirements of wind tunnel test teams and describes how these requirements can be achieved. There are many models for test teams being used in ground-test capabilities. Some models have experts each handling one particular function of the team. For instance, the project manager might be the system engineer for the team and handle the interaction with the customer and track cost and schedule. The project engineer might be involved in the details of daily conduct of the test planning, execution, and reporting. Other members of the team could be the instrumentation engineer, the installation engineer, and the analysis engineer plus the many technicians required to operate the facility and other equipment. As described above, this test team will need many diverse skills in conducting test projects in the future. Each of them will have to understand diverse test techniques, equipment operations, and program needs to ensure the test meets the needs of the customers. The new trisonic test capability will be more of a challenge to conduct the tests because of the many options it offers to make the tests more efficient with higher quality data.