Imaging Acoustic Signature Analyses for Plant Turbo-machinery

Rotating machinery is used in industrial applications, both in the US military and civilian worlds. Monitoring the health of this equipment is vital for uninterrupted operations; in a continuous-process plant, machinery downtime is very expensive. Unfortunately, machinery health is now monitored manually at routine intervals, typically months. What is needed is essentially continuous and ubiquitous monitoring. The Air Force has decided that using acoustic imaging technology is a potentially viable way to achieve this. However, using personnel to continuously monitor the acoustic results to identify potential defects is expensive, and is not a cost effective solution to the problem. The proposed effort would provide the sensors and processing to monitor machinery continuously and remotely, and the automated processing hardware and software to identify points of impending failure at the earliest possible moment. Technology developed in the field of underwater acoustics for submarine detection, classification, localization, and recent developments in air-acoustics for enhanced situational awareness in urban operations, are highly leveraged in this effort.