Description: We propose a portable data acquisition and prognostic system that contains both hardware and software with several innovative ideas. First, our hardware system consists of a high speed data acquisition card and a portable lunchbox PC. The portable lunchbox PC has advanced prognostics algorithms and user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) for displaying component fault status and trends. Second, the prognostics software has several innovative algorithms, which will be implemented in Labview. The first one is an adaptive physics based prognostic tool. The idea is motivated by damage mechanics, which associates the vibration amplitude and natural frequency of the vibration to the damage status. This idea has been experimentally proven to be very accurate in bearing failure prediction. The second prognostic tool is data driven and is a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based approach that can predict the degraded state of the system. Tests using experimental data showed that the various degraded states can be correctly and unambiguously identified by the algorithm. The third tool is a hybrid one and was proven to achieve very high performance in the 2008 PHM Challenge. Finally, to further enhance the prognostic performance, we propose to apply Dempster Shafer algorithm to perform prognostic fusion.

Benefits: The proposed system can be applied to NASA equipment health monitoring (control actuators), component degradation trending (valves), and nondestructive evaluation using ultrasonics.

The technology can be used in any military, or commercial application, where electromechanical systems involving rotating mechanical components are used. The proposed system may also be extended to many other applications, such as turbine engines, bearings, pumps, gearboxes, motors, etc. The research results of this project will lay down a solid foundation for future commercialization effort with the above applications. According to study RGB-177N on Non-Destructive Testing: An Expanding Market, the U.S. nondestructive testing (NDT) equipment market currently stands at $799 million. This market is projected to grow at an AAGR (average annual growth rate) of 3.6% to reach $952 million by 2004. Equipment health monitoring has many applications such as helicopter gearbox systems, jet and automotive engine diagnostics, and many of the safety critical systems in military and commercial aircraft. The jet and automobile industries are multibillion dollar industries that need this technology.