Marius Gheorghe, PhD

One of Ideal Aerosmith’s strengths is finding innovative solutions that satisfy the ever-increasing pressure to reduce costs, increase throughput and improve quality. When we were approached by a prominent tool manufacturer about testing specialized tools, which employ IMUs as core measurement instruments, we were ready to help.  

When testing a passenger aircraft’s evacuation slide, all of its safety-critical components must be thoroughly verified. Equally important is preventing the slide’s accidental deployment. While missing possible malfunctions in safety-critical components could have dire consequences, accidentally deploying the slide during testing would also be very expensive.

The testing and calibration of inertial measurement units (IMUs) is a complex endeavor, especially as IMU technology outgrows the capabilities of equipment used in the testing process. With replacement proving to be both costly and time-consuming, Ideal Aerosmith took it upon itself to find manufacturers a feasible alternative.

Sometimes, a customer needs a testing solution, but they don’t have the resources (or time) to purchase one. When one of Ideal Aerosmith’s customers was challenged by a tight budget and short timeline, the Ideal Aerosmith team stepped up to help their project succeed.

When calibrating and verifying thirty inertial measurement units (IMUs) at the same time, one catastrophic failure can result in a costly retesting of the entire batch. If one bad IMU is allowed to impact all the others, the efficiency of simultaneous testing suffers. As one manufacturer planned its process, it relied on Ideal Aerosmith to make IMU testing as efficient as possible.

Precision inertial testing is not a process that is easy to scale up. However, it is much less challenging when you work with the experienced team at Ideal Aerosmith. As one customer was pleased to learn, with innovation and ingenuity, it’s possible to increase throughput without sacrificing quality.

When some uncertainty in technical nomenclature threatened the prompt delivery of test rigs for an aerospace customer, Ideal Aerosmith developed a non-traditional, elegant solution to overcome the challenge.

The more that humans venture into space, either with manned or unmanned missions, the more important telemetry becomes to our long-term success. We need spacecraft to send information back to earth so that we can capitalize on our success and learn from our mistakes. To that end, an important player in the burgeoning private spaceflight industry recently worked with Ideal Aerosmith’s Marius Gheorghe and his team to overcome an important challenge – how to transmit and interpret massive quantities of test data at a rate that pushed the limits of modern technology.