Health Monitoring of Rotating Engine Parts

We propose to upgrade a blade vibration monitoring system developed 15 years ago: 1) to improve its sensitivity and vibration measurement capability with the goal of using the improved system in on-going research in active high-cycle fatigue abatement for rotor blades; 2) develop the system, especially its electronics and software, and bring it to current aerospace industry standards to become the core of an on-board crack detection system that could be included in new engines or retrofitted to existing ones. The basic technology is a capacitive blade detection system which, couples to a very accurate timer, and post-processing, figures out the dither in the time-of-passage due to a blade resonance and infers synchronous vibration that way. The sensor is small, non-intrusive and one sensor measures all blades in one disk, hence has great operational potential. The early version of this system was demonstrated in Poland, where it was originally developed and did detect blade damage in actual operational jet engines.