Xenotran proposes to develop a Vehicle Health Monitoring (VHM) sensor based on inductive coupling for detecting failure initiation, and crack propagation in composite materials. The VHM system consists of a very low cost crack sensing transducer that can be interrogated and powered wirelessly from a portable RF interrogator. The proposed Xenotran sensor consists of minimal components resulting in maximum reliability. Using this methodolgy as well as Commercial Off-The-Shelf technology (COTS), both development and manufacturing costs of the sensors and interrogator are kept low resulting in true easily implemented and disposable sensors.
Benefits: Xenotran sees two products emerging from the work to be conducted in this proposal. The first is the licensing of the technology to companies engaged in the production of composite materials, the second is the direct sale of sensors and readers to OEMs engaged in the production and sale of sensors and transducers to both the civilian and military markets. Xenotran sees the final product of this development effort as a low cost high reliability product, which is designed so that it can be easily integrated into aerospace applications allowing simple evaluation of composite material integrity. Xenotran will market and license the crack sensor interface to OEMs who are engaged in the use of integrated circuits for sensors and signal conditioning. It is expected that the largest market will be found in the aerospace and automotive industries, where the motivating force is to obtain low cost less labor intensive non-intrusive vehicle health monitoring systems for early detection of structural degradation.
Keywords: crack sensing, composite materials, vehicle health monitoring, wireless
