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Prognostics & Diagnostics
Creare develops prognostic and diagnostic tools to help ensure appropriate equipment maintenance, avoid failures, and reduce downtime. We develop these tools by identifying sensors that provide critical data on equipment health, creating algorithms to analyze the data for important trends or characteristics, and integrating these components with electronics and network interfaces to provide a health monitoring system.
An example of this work is a prognostic Health and Usage Management System (HUMS) for aircraftt hydraulic pumps (P-HUMS) Creare developed to improve aircraft reliability and readiness by accurately recognizing and diagnosing pump problems prior to complete failure. The P-HUMS uses algorithms that monitor fluid pressure, flow, temperature, and vibration signatures to identify a range of failures which include bearing, cavitation, piston erosion, and temperature-related faults. The P-HUMS was developed and evaluated for monitoring three different hydraulic piston pumps: an industrial grade pump, a pump for the auxiliary power unit on the U.S. Air Force F-16, and a pump on the U.S. Army CH-47. We demonstrated the ability to classify the exact failure type with greater than 90% accuracy, and the ability to classify the more general case of a bad pump from a good pump with greater than 99% accuracy.
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In another example, Creare developed an integrated environmental corrosivity monitoring system to provide quantitative data for military equipment in challenging corrosive environments such as Navy aircraft. The instrument incorporates an innovative integrated sensor suite capable of monitoring environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, moisture conductivity, pH, and corrosivity (e.g. galvanic activity) data over a wide range of operating conditions. A compact data acquisition microcomputer gathers data over long periods of time. |
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Creare is currently developing a health monitoring system for the repeatable release holdback bar (RRHB) that holds the aircraft in place on an aircraft carrier catapult just prior to launch. When the catapult is activated, the RRHB releases the aircraft when the combined thrust of aircraft and the catapult reach a desired level, on the order of 20,000 to 75,000 lbs. depending on the aircraft. The RRHB is a purely mechanical device; Creare is developing a ruggedized, low-power, self-contained health monitoring system that can be attached to the RRHB to monitor the release load for every launch and report any problems to maintainers in between normal maintenance cycles. In laboratory tests we have demonstrated better than 0.5% load measurement accuracy, for a lifetime of more than 800 simulated launches, and covering the applicable shipboard temperature range. Like Creare’s robotic catapult instrument already in use on all carriers in the U.S. fleet, the RRHB monitoring system will help ensure safer aircraft launches with reduced maintenance costs and downtime. |
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