Helmsman's Recording Accelerometer (HRA)

Special Operations Forces (SOF) require a real time display of appr opriate data to allow the helmsman to access the damage potential to his cargo (equipment/personnel) and support his decision relative to speed and course selection when operating in rough water. Furthermore, maintenance support personnel need quantitative data to support design decisions and maintenance activities. This proposal presents an affordable solution to the display and recording of peak acceleration data. Furthermore, AMSI defines a program to acquire data to relate the acceneration levels with force and strain data to evaluate habitability and hull fatigue for use by maintenance activities. Within the SBIR Phase I budget, AMSI will integrate accelerometers, load cells, and strain gauges with a rugged HRA test bed data acquisition system to define components and measurement locations based on onboard measurements conducted at sea off Tampa during the 10 meter RIB runoff. With the miniat rization of electronics, high density RAM, and advent of signal processing chips it is squite feasible to develop a low cost robust acceleration measurement and display. Once the system design is finalized (Phase II), follow-on systems are predicted to cost less than $10K per copy including the sensors, displays, and computer components.