Structural Integrity Monitoring System

The objective of the proposed work is to develop and fabricate a wireless, self powered smart sensor system based on an array of piezoelectric materials to measure strain in dynamic components for Army aircraft and helicopters. The main objectives of the Phase I effort are to investigate the feasibility, affordability and applicability of a class of smart sensors and advanced processing that can be: (1) powered by energy harvested from the environment of the sensor, (2) operated wirelessly as part of an open, standards based network, and (3) packaged into an affordable unit for military and commercial applications. In order to avoid the maintenance overhead of post processing the Gigabytes of data that can easily be generated by monitoring systems, our smart sensor concept includes a wireless sensor module that is capable of recording and on-board processing of the collected data to generate key usage parameters sufficient to assess the health of the vehicle.