Measurement automation for small jet engine testing

For a small gas turbine engine test cell newly developed and built at the University of Defence in Brno a system for automated measurement and engine test control was designed. The system is based on National Instruments Compact RIO hardware and LabVIEW software and is implementing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) architecture. This paper describes the requirements that drove the decision to develop the software in-house as well as its architecture. It also in detail shows the structure of all three levels of the software that operates separately on the FPGA, cRIO and PC hardware and the communication protocols utilized for information sharing among them.