This article focuses on that helicopters often display a rotor torque reading on their instrument panels to tell pilots how close they are flying to transmission design limits. With no measure of torque, a limit based on engine power is necessarily conservative. Torque monitors can increase a helicopter’s time between overhauls. Mechanical resonance, it seems, developed when the two engines were operated at matched torques. The torque meter lets the pilot split the torque to the two engines by 2 percent, diminishing any resonance. Permitted speculation, the Siemens researchers observed applications for their instrument beyond the traditional realm of torque measurement. In automotive applications, for instance, the researchers envision their torque measurement system one day being used in car engines to provide data in real time to the engine controls.
Implementation of a reconfigurable hard real-time control system for mechatronic and automotive applications