Health Monitoring System for Constant Speed Drives

The Air Force is seeking a self-contained, self-powered device to be installed within their constant speed drives (CSDs) that can monitor the drive’s health by performing functions such as counting input shaft rotations, measuring temperature, and monitoring for dangerous vibrations. During Phase I Mainstream Engineering designed and built hardware that demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating a self-powered health-monitoring device into a CSD. The device was capable of collecting data such as input shaft speed, number of rotations, temperature, and acceleration. In Phase II Mainstream Engineering proposes to continue development and testing of its novel self-powered health-monitoring device for the Air Force’s fleet of constant speed drives. The Phase II work plan, presented within this proposal, details the fabrication and experimental validation of a second and third generation health monitoring device that is custom tailored to meet the size constraints and challenging demands of the environment it will be used in. The work plan involves building and testing the health-monitoring device in Mainstream’s labs and then installing the device in a constant speed drive in an Air Force laboratory for reliability testing and prognostic algorithm development.