Shipboard Shock & Vibration Environmental Monitoring and Recording

There is currently no integrated and systemic means of monitoring and recording the forces which lead to fatigue and eventual catastrophic failure of shipboard equipment. Such instrumentation has traditionally been reserved for highly controlled, instrumented sea tests such as shock trials. The surface fleet has an urgent need to develop and integrate an onboard shock and vibration monitoring system. Constellations of strategically placed sensors can measure the magnitude and record all such events which occur from normal underway operations and casualty scenarios such as the effect of hull slamming in high seas. This system will monitor, record, and aggregate acceleration, velocity, and displacement vector time series data across the platform. This data can be used to support predictive fatigue models for preventive maintenance as well as drive changes in new ship designs. Utilizing remotely attached sensors allows the selection of different sensor types for the specific application mated to common, programmable processing modules. Sensor placement on the device or structure of interest is particularly critical for accurate monitoring. The processing modules would contain configurable signal conditioning stages for several sensor channels, employ ultra low power processing with a multilevel power management scheme, wireless communications, and removable flash media.