Portable Wireless Vibration Monitoring System for Shipboard Applications

Aircraft diagnostic and prognostic systems can enhance aircraft safety, reduce total costs of ownership, and increase asset availability. However, they require a great deal of integration with the platform. Wiring such a system into the aircraft makes up alarge percentage of overall system complexity, cost, and weight. Wireless transducers have enormous potential to simplify new and retrofitted diagnostic/prognostic systems by eliminating currently required cabling and interconnects, enhancing robustnessvia redundancy, easing sensor placement, and reducing system weights. A wireless system also allows for flexibility in sensor placement to meet changing system needs and to aid in identifying, troubleshooting, and monitoring emerging fleet problems.Luna Innovations and its research partners will develop a wireless sensor system for on-board, real-time aircraft health monitoring. The development team will survey the aircraft application and determine candidate sensors and system architecture. Thesystem will work under constraints such as long operational lifetime, low power, non-light-of-sight, high bandwidth and ease of integration. The developed system will consider flight qualification, sensor size, and will offer performance comparable toexisting systems. Luna will leverage previous wireless sensor development efforts and commercial production capabilities to satisfy the immediate Navy requirements and bring the developed technology to near-term market.Luna Innovations anticipates large related markets in preventive maintenance systems and diagnostic instrumentation coupled with wireless transmission capability. Specific applications include shipboard, spacecraft, aircraft, and nuclear/conventional powerplant health monitoring, transportation vehicle design and testing, and industrial rotating machine monitoring. The previous success in this area resulted in a spin-off company, dedicated to the production of wireless instrumentation systems forindustrial rotating machine health monitoring utilizing off-the-shelf RF technology, and has over $1 million/year in revenue. Products resulting from this research will undergo immediate transition for introduction to the market.