Impact Technologies LLC, proposes to design, develop and demonstrate a SHM enabled Decision Support Toolkit for the Littoral Combat Ship. Our focus is on delivering innovative technologies to the Navy that will transform raw SHM data into actionable information serving both LCS Operators and Maintainers. Building off experience in a wide variety of SHM and Condition Based Maintenance programs, the Impact team will first define a modular and scalable toolkit architecture that can be integrated with ICAS. We further propose to develop and demonstrate current (diagnostic) and future (prognostic) structural integrity assessments tools that will serve to fuse, classify and reason upon the current LCS SHM sensor suite and expand in capability and accuracy if/when the monitoring suite is enhanced on the LCS or future surface combatants. The Toolkit will distill structural integrity assessments into near real-time knowledge of loading relative to the safe operating envelope for Operators and into long term risk assessment, recommended corrective actions, and asset utilization for maintainers and fleet managers. We will demonstrate the toolkit in software in the Phase I final review using representative LCS sea trial data along with future technology maturation and transition plan.
Benefit: Key benefits of the proposed technologies revolve around data distillation into structural integrity and health information for individual structural components through innovative and robust analysis & fusion techniques, and development of an extensible architecture allowing for easy integration of future technologies. The technologies developed under this program will be generic in nature and easily adaptable to comparable efforts in other areas such as aircraft, building structures, and ground vehicles to name a few. Because maintenance and support tasks account for the largest portion of total ownership costs for both military and commercial marine systems and equipment, significant savings can be realized over the course of the lifecycle of these systems if maintenance decision-making and operations are improved with structural health monitoring technologies. These economic and system reliability benefits will ensure that the developments of this proposal will have a place in a wide variety of commercial and military sectors, including aviation, shipping and power generation industries, among others.
Keywords: Prognostics, Prognostics, SHM, data fusion, structural health monitoring, Diagnostics, ship hull integrity
