Corrosion Sensors for Army Missile Systems and Aircraft Applications

Corrosion Health Monitoring Systems (HMS) and Prognostics are key to maintaining the performance and reliability of high value, critical structures. Army seeks to minimize life-cycle costs due to environmental degradation of nonmetallic materials and corrosion of metals for missile and aging aircraft components by early detection, monitoring and prediction of corrosion using a HMS that satisfies critical size, weight, power and location constraints, e.g. underneath paint layers, thereby requiring state-of-the-art in microsensor and electronic subsystem technologies. Combining its sensor products and a custom-designed 3M Flexicircuit, Analatom proposes to develop a Corrosion Monitoring system that is both practical and feasible for missiles and aircraft monitoring, consisting of a multiplexed system of several nodes that obtain data from several low cost, microfabricated corrosion and MEMS strain gauge sensors with real time intelligent algorithms to detect, monitor and predict corrosion rates; use simple integrated electronic components for sensor interfacing; low cost, off-the-shelf microcontroller chips for data acquisition and processing, and download the sensor network data to a central health management system. During Phase I, the architectural strategy and failure-mode prediction algorithms will be developed along with feasibility demonstration. Software and interface protocols issues will additionally be addressed during this effort.