Aircraft cable fault diagnosing is considered to be most important for engineering maintenance. Several methods for cables testing have been developed, such as TDR, FDR and TFDR. Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) relays much on impedance changes on the fault position, which is hard to using in detecting high resistance defects, intermittent defects; Time Frequency Domain Reflectometry (TFDR) method is used to locate intermittent faults, continuous faults and cross-connection faults aircraft wire, however, the algorithm of TFDR is complex. To the "Hard Fault"(short circuit and open circuit), the Hilbert-Huang Transform method is used in determining the optimal bandwidth of the incident reference signal and analyzing the phase and amplitude difference of superimposed signal which from the incident signal and the reflected signal on defects. To the "Fray Fault", Time and Frequency Domain Reflectometry method can be used with the signal processing method with Hilbert-Huang Transform. The experimental results indicate that this method effectively detect all types of aircraft cable fault, particularly for short lengths of cable.
Application of time-frequency domain reflectometry for measuring load impedance
