Comprehensive Vehicle Health Monitoring Sensor System

To address the Army’s need for vehicle health monitoring sensor and data fusion system to effectively monitor and predict failures in high payoff areas, and to capture information about the usage of the vehicle to accurately determine the state of health of vehicle systems and components, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new Comprehensive Vehicle Health Monitoring Sensor (COVEM) system. This proposed COVEM is based on the fusion of several optical fiber sensing technologies to monitor all significant vehicle-health-related events/parameters. The system offers the following features: 1) high accuracy; 2) high-sensitivity; 3) compactness and light weight; 4) self-containing and energy efficient; 5) reliability; and 6) cost-effectiveness. The innovation is in use of a novel fiber-optic-based system design of the COVEM to make simultaneous measurements of all the vehicle-health-related events/parameters, such as liquid quality, tire pressure, and shock events. In Phase I POC will demonstrate the feasibility of COVEM by investigating the system design by computer modeling, and fabricating and testing a breadboard prototype (TRL 4) in a simulated platform. In Phase II an advanced, miniaturized COVEM engineering prototype at TRL 5 will be assembled and tested both at POC and at an Army facility.