Shipboard Shock & Vibration Environmental Monitoring and Recording

This proposal describes an approach to develop a small, rugged, stand-alone system to measure acceleration, velocity and displacement time histories of casualty events onboard ship. This device will reliably and accurately supply prognostic monitoring of mission critical assets from measured real-world casualty events. Additional benefits would incorporate recorded data for future ship design tools and models. Presenting this capability represents a cost savings by verifying the need for related testing while correlating real-time data to determine test levels. Further, knowing levels reached in a particular location allows maintenance of related assets on known fragility levels as opposed to arbitrary schedules. Our approach will apply our experience and expertise of accurate shock and vibration environmental measurement via autonomous ruggedized field data recorders. We must optimize the configuration with state-of-the-art technology to guarantee accurate measurements per naval standards while minimizing maintenance and cost. This requires demonstrating the feasibility of different power saving approaches and their effects on data integrity. Additionally, a mechanical design to minimize interference and maintain a small self-contained form factor will be proven. The successful outcome of this research will lead to a phase II prototype development designed to validate our approach and prepare for phase III commercialization.