Design of adaptive dimming power control system for civil aircraft lightplates

Abstract

The aircraft lightplates are used to provide backlight lighting for the control panels in the cockpit of the aircraft. The flight crew needs to adjust the backlight brightness by switching knobs with the change of the external light environment of the aircraft. In this paper, an adaptive dimming power control system of aircraft lightplates is proposed, which can significantly reduce the operating burden of flight crew. Based on a microprocessor, the system detects the change of ambient illumination in each area of the cockpit by multiple light intensity sensors distributed in the cockpit. The processor synthetically processes the light intensity sensor signals in different positions. Finally, it outputs PWM (Pulse width modulation) signals according to the given dimming curve, to provide dimming control of the aircraft lightplates. The simulation results show that the dimming power control system can adjust the brightness of the aircraft lightplates adaptively with the change of ambient light, and achieve the purpose of reducing the burden of the flight crew.