Smart Environmental Corrosivity Sensor Suite for Aircraft Applications

Corrosion of aircraft and rotorcraft is the single largest maintenance cost driver for the Navy and Marine Corps. In order to maximize aircraft availability and minimize inspection and maintenance demands, Luna proposes to develop a miniature, light weight sensor suite that will measure corrosive severity of aircraft operational environments. The smart corrosivity sensor suite will monitor multiple environmental parameters and quantify cumulative corrosive effects that an aircraft experiences. The light weight and small size of the self contained sensor suite will permit instrumentation of critical components and “corrosion hotspots” within the aircraft. The sensor suite will be designed as a smart transducer interface module for compatibility with a network capable application processor such as the miniature corrosion sensor hub (Topic N07-169). The sensor suite will be a low power device for long life use with a battery or energy scavenging module (Topic N07-178). Luna’s environmental corrosivity sensor suite will fuse measurements of environmental parameters and corrosivity for improved state awareness and reduced uncertainty in estimating coating system breakdown and structural material damage. The Phase I effort will be concluded by demonstrating the correlation of the breadboard prototype sensor suite response with corrosion of aircraft alloys in accelerated environmental corrosion tests.