Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [55]
Meanwhile, Eaton-owned FR-HiTemp provided pumps and valves for the fuel system to FHI and MHI in Japan for installation in the center and wing tanks, respectively. The fuel system pump and valves package included 47 different part numbers and 216 components, and included electrically driven pumps using twice the voltage of previous commercial aircraft. The company’s HiTemp team also teamed with Hamilton Sundstrand and Carleton on the nitrogen generating system.
COMMON CORE
The thinking brain of the 787 was the common core system (CCS). Developed by GE Aerospace, the CCS concentrated the processing functions of many different systems in one spot, saving weight, cost, and power. The CCS concept allowed the avionics system to be upgraded almost as easily as a modern personal computer and embodied the goals of Boeing’s original open-systems architecture concept.
“Boeing has chosen to design the 787 a little bit differently by using the CCS,” said GE Aerospace 787 CCS Program Director Mike Madden. “It is a scalable and a modular system, which means you can add elements of the system without having to redesign the entire thing, and its modularity means these elements are all common.”
The CCS followed the growing trend for integrated modular architectures (IMAs), in which more and more functions are tied together. Boeing’s open-standards computing “platform” combined more than eighty functions into one computer system and built upon foundations laid by the C-130 Aircraft Modernization Program (AMP) upgrade and the 777’s Aircraft Information Management System (AIMS). The 777 had about eighty separate computer systems with about a hundred different devices, versus thirty computer systems on the 787.
The CCS consisted of three main elements: a common computing resource (CCR), a cabinet that housed general processing and application-specific modules; a Rockwell Collins–developed common data network (CDN), which used the deterministic Ethernet 664/AFDX (Avionics Full Duplex) standard; and a series of remote data concentrators (RDCs). The massively capable network supported both copper and fiber-optic interfaces with connection speeds of 10 and 100 Mbps, or up to a thousand times faster than the ARINC 429 data buses used in existing generation avionics.
Each 787 had two CCR cabinets, with eight general processing modules, network switches, and two fiber-optic translator modules in each cabinet. The CDN was made up of network switches inside the CCR cabinets as well as throughout the aircraft. Provided by GE Aerospace’s Cheltenham site in the United Kingdom, the RDCs replaced dedicated wiring and concentrated signals from the aircraft’s twenty-one remote sensors and effectors, feeding them into the network. The effectors sent signals to make units such as actuators move.
The 787 used COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) operating system software by Green Hills Software and Wind River Systems in the core avionics systems. “Wind River is for the CCS in particular, while Green Hills is more for the flight control system,” said Sinnett, who added that the benefits of adopting the COTS approach would be felt throughout the long lifetime of the 787. “Rather than having everyone develop their own interface and operating system, they can plug directly in using these. When something has to be changed and updated, you can change the operating system without having to recertificate the codes.”
GE Aerospace selected Wind River Systems’ VxWorks 653 real-time operating system (RTOS) for the CCS. “We needed a partitioned operating environment which allowed us to share processing resources amongst a number of applications.