• New high speed, lightweight, compact Axon DAU provides FTI engineers with unprecedented combination of flexibility, scalability, and reliability

ASHBURN, Va. – January 17, 2018 – Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division today announced the general availability of production units of the next-generation compact Axon Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) for flight test applications. Axon combines unprecedented flexibility and scalability with high speed and outstanding reliability for demanding flight test applications. The innovative modular Axon DAU builds on Curtiss-Wright’s heritage as a leading supplier of rugged reliable data acquisition. Optimized for size, weight and power (SWaP), Axon works with Curtiss-Wright’s widely used Acra KAM-500 and TTC DAUs, while reducing volume by 55% and weight by 41% compared to a standard KAM-500 chassis. Axon is ideal for use in aircraft flight test instrumentation, airborne telemetry, flight data monitoring and space data handling applications.

“We are very excited to announce that our innovative new Axon data acquisition platform is now shipping,” said Lynn Bamford, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Defense Solutions division. “Axon uniquely enables flight fest instrumentation engineers to lower the weight of equipment and wiring, gather more data faster, and meet demanding time schedules without compromising data integrity. Axon’s miniature size and unprecedented flexible installation options make it possible to place data acquisition in remote locations never previously possible.”

Designed to deliver maximum reliability, Axon’s hardware-based acquisition engines eliminate data loss, support deterministic operation, and ensure immediate recovery in the case of power brownout. Axon’s high-speed serial backplane (1 Gbps dedicated link per module) enables off-the-shelf data acquisition modules to be placed in ultra-miniature Axonite housings and located remotely, separated from the chassis by up to 20 meters. Locating data acquisition closer to the sensors can significantly decrease the installation time and cost of the instrumentation while simultaneously reducing wiring weight. Using Axonite housings (< 8 cubic inches in volume), flight test engineers can place their data acquisition hardware in space limited locations. Further flexibility is provided by Axon’s dual Gigabit Ethernet outputs, which simplify the addition of Ethernet nodes or allow multiple DAU chassis to be daisy chained. An on-board processor speeds configuration, pre-flight checks, and in-service firmware upgrading.

Axon’s solid chassis design provides environmental ruggedness and supports rapid configuration changes. The DAU’s high-speed serial backplane ensures that the chassis’ throughput can scale with future increases in data source bandwidth, protecting the customer’s investment in the current generation of acquisition modules.

Configurations built with a combination of Axon and other Curtiss-Wright DAUs are able to support the synchronous sampling of every channel in the system. Because Axon supports the same data formats as other Curtiss-Wright DAUs, data from both the remote and main DAUs can be simultaneously analyzed and correlated. For configuration, Axon is supported by Curtiss-Wright’s powerful and intuitive DAS Studio and TTCWare setup software packages.

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