Spin Stabilization of an Air Ambulance Litter

This paper proposes a new approach to stabilize the spin of a suspended litter during air ambulance rescue hoist operations. Complex forces generated by the helicopter’s downwash may cause a patient suspended in a rescue litter to spin violently. In severe cases, the spin destabilizes the suspended load, risks injury to the patient, and jeopardizes the safety of the aircrew. The presented design employs an anti-torque device to arrest the spin that is safer and faster than a tagline and is without the tactical constraints of the tagline. The device follows tailored control laws to accelerate a flywheel attached to the litter, thereby generating sufficient angular momentum to counteract the spin and stabilize the suspended litter. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) measures the position, angular velocity, and angular acceleration of the litter and delivers this information to a microcontroller. The research and prototype design were developed under the support of the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR).

Failure Analysis of a Damaged Helicopter Rescue Hoist Cable

This paper presents the results and main conclusions of a study made to analyze the cause of failure occurred with an austenitic 304 class stainless steel wire rope of a helicopter rescue hoist. The cable is made up of 19 strands, 12 outside and 7 inside. As each strand contains 7 wires, the whole cable is made up of 133 wires. The study includes the chemical and microstructural characterization of the material, as well as the determination of its hardness, mechanical properties and the fractographic analysis by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Tensile tests were performed for three velocities simulating different work conditions: 250mm/min, 50mm/min and 5mm/min. The fractographic analysis shows that the cable suffered lateral loss of material due to friction and leading to the failure of the remaining material by ductile mode.