Use of Sensor Technology To Impact Corrosion Management of Combat Rescue Helicopter

The Department of Defense (DOD) needs lightweight, low-power sensor systems capable of detecting, monitoring, and analyzing corrosive environments to quantitatively affect maintenance intervals. The sensors must operate in corrosion-prone and limited access areas. This need can be met through low-volume, unobtrusive sensor systems, application-specific modeling, and diagnostic assessment. This proposal presents a plan to develop a low-power, wireless, sensor node to capture relevant data, an innovative corrosion dosimeter to advance the current suite of sensors, and state-of-the-art corrosion modeling to process collected data into actionable information. The advantage of this approach compared to conventional environmental monitoring is the corrosion model will utilize local environmental data and that data will include dosimetry sensors to capture the time-variant fluctuations that would otherwise be missed by intermittent sampling. The sensor nodes add the capability for local environmental monitoring, and the dosimeter adds a mechanism for error correction in modelling.