Phase II Amount
$1,082,017
The Navy has a critical need for the ability to predict, monitor, and assess the structural health of their high performance ships. While methods currently exist that attempt to fulfill this need, they are undesirably labor-intensive and time consuming and do not have the ability to process operational variables such as load, material condition, sea-state, weather, etc. A software toolset that can collect, analyze, and display data from a variety of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) sensors in a way that aides decision makers in determining operational and maintenance planning would be invaluable to the Navy. To provide this capability, in Phase I, McQ initiated the research and development of the Integrated Naval Ship Condition Assessment Toolset (INSCAT). As the name implies, the INSCAT is comprised of several software subsystems integrated into a single toolset for monitoring the structural health of naval ships. The INSCAT includes a multi-tiered CAD based GUI to display pertinent SHM data, AI (SOM) based SHM algorithms for real time situational awareness and long term SHM oversight, and a flexible data interface to facilitate integration with current Navy systems such as the integrated condition assessment system (ICAS).
Benefit: Application of the INSCAT resulting from Phase II is possible in a few different markets. There are many types of military and commercial applications of the INSCAT including aircraft, tanks, submarines, etc. The Navy alone has 256 ships and more than 3700 aircraft that the INSCAT could be targeted for (http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy_hr.asp?id=146). In addition to vehicle CBM systems for the Navy, there is a significant need for bridge SHM systems in the United States. In 2008, the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) considered 151,391 of Americas bridges to be deficient (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/defbr08.cfm#a). Because the INSCAT will utilize an open architecture, it will be straight forward for bridge maintainers to integrate the INSCAT into their CBM programs in the interest of public safety. Just based on the sheer number of bridge structures that the FHA considers deficient, commercialization of the INSCAT is practical. If even a fraction of the deficient bridges in the U.S. are retrofit with a system such as INSCAT (e.g. 1,000 bridges) at a cost of $10,000 per system $10,000,000 in revenue will have been generated from this SBIR effort.
Keywords: OSA-CBM, self organizing map, Monitoring, Analysis, Structure
