Background

An aerospace Tier 1 original equipment manufacturing company developing a primary electrical power distribution sub-system agreed with its customer that it would take responsibility for performing technical maturation and risk reduction development testing.  To accomplish this it needed to architect, design, build and validate an electrical power system integration test facility.  Such a facility needed to include multiple power generation sources be reliable, functional, reconfigurable and above all safe; this despite the need to deliberately do very bad things to a perfectly good system through the injection of hazardous failures.  Although the companies’ design, manufacturing, validation and verification teams were highly talented and dedicated they had never engineered or been exposed to such a facility.  They spent a considerable portion of the schedule and budget in learning mode with little progress beyond the initial installation of dynamometer infrastructure and making available enough electrical energy.  To catch up and to placate its customer, the company leadership implemented a recovery plan that included contracting with Kaney to provide non-advocate review of its systems integration test program, test facilities and to provide hands on leadership to rapidly develop a “Skunk Works” solution.

Result

Using a small Kaney team of independent experienced system engineering consultants over a nine-month period, the company developed a functional, safe and reliable manually operated electrical power system integration facility that included real and synthetic power sources, instrumentation and communication.  The team also wrote system integration test plans and procedures.  The team went on to assist in the operation of the facility for the following nine months.  The result was a successful risk mitigation test program and accolades for the company from the prime customer.

Kaney’s Involvement

• Kaney provided an experienced “hands on” system engineering team to architect, design and assist in the build and commissioning of the system integration facility.
• Kaney provided mentorship to a young team of talented customer engineers.
• Kaney wrote the system integration test plans and procedures.
• Kaney assisted in the development of test facility standard operating procedures.
• Kaney provided leadership in test facility safety practices.
• Kaney provided analysis and validation evidence to support Test Readiness Review of failure insertion tests.