Modeling and Development of an Experimental Pneumatic Facility for Aircraft Bleed Air System Studies

Research on aircraft bleed air systems has been performed at Ryerson University for the last eight years. During this time, the requirements of the test apparatus have been constantly expanding. This thesis work aims at developing a new reconfigurable rig that supports current and future research on aircraft bleed air control systems and takes advantage of lessons learned from previous test rigs. The new rig consists of two temperature control channels in a parallel arrangement to allow for flow sharing control, and a load tank with variable exhaust. Beyond the development of the test rig, research has been performed to improve mass flow measurement based on signals from traditional thermal mass flow and pressure sensors. The proposed method utilized these redundant means of indicating flow to obtain fast and accurate flow measurement through the use of a dynamically weighted average. This method has been experimentally investigated using the test rig.