Advanced Arresting Gear Water Twister Diagnostics and Health Monitoring

The arresting system is a critical component to ensure mission readiness and pilot safety during landing operations on an aircraft carrier. The Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) water twister is the most critical mechanical component for absorbing kinetic energy from landing aircraft and as such it is necessary to ensure its reliability and health status. Issues have previously been identified with the design of the new AAG technology, specifically with the water twister, which has led to delays for system delivery and increased cost. A man portable diagnostic tool is desired to accurately and reliably assess the health of the water twister, for which no inspection tools have yet proven reliable. This proposal describes an acoustic emission (AE) inspection solution which will allow for detection, localization, and classification of damage within both the rotor blades as well as the stator plates. AE technology has had great success in early damage detection in a wide variety of rotating machinery applications. New, patent-pending shear sensitive AE sensors will be used to distinguish and isolate water-borne noise sources. Detection will focus on both cracking and corrosion damage, and advanced algorithms will be used to precisely identify damage location within the water twister.