Damage Detection in Complex Fastened Joints Navy SBIR FY2016.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2016.1 Topic No.: N161-009 Topic Title: Damage Detection in Complex Fastened Joints Proposal No.: N161-009-0493 Firm: Metis Design Corporation 205 Portland St 4th Floor Boston, Massachusetts 2114 Contact: Seth Kessler Phone: (617) 447-2172 Web Site: http://www.MetisDesign.com Abstract: Rotorcraft have been at the forefront of Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) technologies. For nearly 20 years, Heath & Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) have been used on rotorcraft such as the H-60, CH-53E, H-1 and V-22 to collect prognostic data to reduce preventative maintenance costs and increase asset availability. The majority of the HUMS data collected today relates to drive system components, such as monitoring vibration off gears, bearings, shafts and rotors. The vast majority of HUMS were developed by Goodrich (now part of UTAS). The proposed technology would expand HUMS hardware to be able to also capture fatigue damage in complex fastened joints. Many Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems in development can detect damage on flat structure, but features hidden in a multi-layer stack can be extremely challenging for conventional technologies. Multiple approaches for addressing this problem will be investigated in this program, each within the concept of using a distributed beamforming array with the fasteners themselves being the sensor elements. By exciting the fasteners directly, more energy will penetrate into the complex joints, thus making it easier to discover hidden damage. Integration with UTAS HUMS hardware will also be addressed. Benefits: Once successfully demonstrated through a Phase II effort, there exists a broad commercial market for this SHM method. One of the key success factors for this technology is its versatility; the ability not only to be integrated into new applications, but to be retrofitted into an existing asset designs. Initial relevant markets would include DoD rotary-wing aircraft, but the technology could easily proliferate into any DoD asset, ranging from fixed-wing manned and unmanned vehicles to ships and ground vehicles, to aid in condition based maintenance. Once demonstrated in defense applications, comparable commercial opportunities exist, particularly for aircraft and potentially buildings and civil infrastructure once the production cost has been driven low enough. MDC will work through strategic partners to license the technology for production and deployment. Return