Modified Acoustic Emission for Prognostic Health Monitoring

Prime Photonics proposes to team with Dr. Duke of Virginia Tech to develop a multi-mode, enhanced piezoelectric acoustic emission sensing system to couple large damage events to local distribution of damage accommodation. Our system will be centered around an instrument designed to accept the output of a piezoelectric transducer sensitive to in-plane acoustic events. The signal processing path will not only monitor high energy acoustic emission events to detect impact events, but also transitions in the background power spectral density of the acoustic emission events, and real time strain. The system will be designed to operate with macro fiber composite (MFCs) sensors to provide the simultaneous AE and strain detection, but will also accept as inputs traditional isometric type transducers. Augmentation of background acoustic energy transition states with temporal and spatial information about impact and strain enables unprecedented non-destructive evaluation capabilities to enable semi-autonomous structural health monitoring of systems and components.

Our system will find particular, near-term application within the Nondestructive Evaluation Sciences Branch, Structural Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials and Structures, and Electronic Instrumentation Systems at NASA, as well as researchers within the National Institute of Aeronautics. In these settings, the Prime Photonics Prognostics System (P3S) will provide value in facilitating material, subcomponent, component, and structural validation of systems in ground-based test and evaluation. Longer term applications will include in-flight structural health monitoring of structures, including load estimation, impact detection, and leak detection. Our system can provide value to both manned and unmanned missions, and particularly in vehicles used for multiple launch and recovery missions.

Target customers for the product will include equipment manufacturers such as Babcock & Wilcox, General Electric, and Honeywell, controls companies such as Goodrich, Hamilton-Sundstrand and GE Industrial Controls, and airframers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Airbus. Competitors in the AE marketplace will be Digital Wave Corporation, Physical Acoustic Corporation, Fuji Ceramics, Vallen Systeme, AV Technology, and others. The ability to monitor background acoustic noise spectra and perform vector acoustic detection differentiate P3S products from its competitors.

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