Structural Health Monitoring of Welded Submarine Structures

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of naval assets has garnered significant interest in recent years.  The push for a larger fleet, which will require service life extensions for current assets, and the emergence of autonomous unmanned vehicles, which may need structural performance monitoring, are driving much of the demand for embedded structural monitoring.  Recent advances in SHM techniques, combined with the gains from advanced data analytics, edge computing, and other benefits of the Navy’s digital transformation, have yielded promising results for fielding structural monitoring and damage detection on structures.  Benefits of SHM can range in time scales from real-time to full life-cycle assessments.  Immediate usage of SHM information includes operator situational awareness, damage assessments, monitoring of structural performance, and continuous monitoring of damage initiation and progression.  Combined with prognostic forecasting, SHM data can provide input for fleet management, individual asset service life decisions, and data driven maintenance.   The work described in this proposal aims to demonstrate the capability of SHM hardware and sensing techniques to monitor cracking in submarine hull structure.