Viscosity-Enhanced Oil Quality Sensor for Machinery Center Equipment Monitoring

Maintaining the health of fluid systems is critically important to preventing breakdowns and maximizing machinery performance. Current fluid quality analysis practices are based on a laborious and expensive oil sample analysis program in which samples drawn from equipment are sent to a laboratory for detailed analysis of debris, contaminations, and lubricity. Impact Technologies has developed the Smart Oil Sensor™ (SOS) to overcome these hurdles and provide real-time, in-situ measurements of lubricant health through electrochemical measurement. While the SOS measurements provide indications of health state changes, they do not provide a direct correlation with viscosity. Accordingly, Impact proposes to integrate on-line viscosity sensing into their Smart Oil Sensor™. The resulting smart sensor will embody the sensing, embedded processing and communications protocols necessary to provide actionable health state information for critical machinery at the Robins Air Logistics Center.