Conducting Stress-Strain Analysis by Remote Sensing

Cracks and loose fasteners are continuing structural problems on H-60 helicopters resulting in unexpected downtime to repair/replace structures. This reduces availability to the warfighter, increases risk, and is expensive and time consuming. The proposed embedded system would provide early detection and assessment of loose fasteners and strain allowing planned repairs and mitigating problems. TRI has developed the LAHMP family of low power, lightweight, wireless, embedded and rugged sensor data collection, storage and transceiver systems. The LAHMP system is rugged, versatile, embeddable and provides monitoring of large areas with just a few COTS sensors. This SBIR effort will adapt existing LAHMP fixed wing architectures to monitoring rotorcraft structures, specifically: measuring strain and detecting loose fasteners in UH-60 structures. The breadboard system will be battery powered; communicate wirelessly over a 2.4GHz mesh network; be small and lightweight; and will maximize use of COTS components. Phase II will address ruggedization; long term reliability and battery life; and improvements to the system. Each LAHMP would be mounted on structures prone to damage and would collect data from several strain gauges and sensors allowing large area detection of loose fasteners. Data would then be available on demand for WiFi enabled devices.