NSF Award
0078670
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will focus on enhancing maintenance operations scheduling methodologies with condition assessment and diagnostic tools to produce an 'integrated' maintenance management system. The company has developed scheduling tools that allocate maintenance resources on the basis of elapsed calendar time and unit utilization. This project will augment these tools with condition assessment modules. If successful, the result would be a generally applicable system combining condition, time, and utilization as drivers for the maintenance process. The project will develop algorithms for condition assessment based on signal processing and feature extraction using both conventional sensors such as accelerometers, and 'next generation' sensors such as eddy current devices, fiber optic sensors, and MEMS sensors. These methods, when applied a maintenance service program, will lead to new methodologies for the synthesis of integrated diagnostics techniques and for the design of new hardware and software systems to realize those techniques for a wide range of practical applications.
