Airbus Wind Tunnel - Delivering value through technical partnership
Serco offers turn-key solutions for industrial data acquisition and control systems, including modifi cations and refurbishment to existing buildings and construction of new facilities.
An example of the work undertaken by Serco is the complete overhaul of the Airbus Wind Tunnel at Filton. The Airbus project consisted of two elements; a complete refurbishment of the wind tunnel facility, from the foyer through to the control room, and the replacement of the existing control system that had been evolving since the tunnel was first opened in 1957.
Serco's design solution was a distributed processor system based on National Instruments FieldPoint equipment with the controlling software developed using NI LabView. By utilising this technology, the data acquisition and control system was modular and scalable, allowing for future expansion and ease of support. All the sub-systems are linked back to the control room workstations via a LAN making it possible to keep all control and monitoring local to the instruments, an important feature as problems with noise and signal loss due to long interconnects have been minimised.