Design, Development, and Demonstration of a Prognostic and Diagnostics Health Monitoring System for the CROWS Platform

Abstract : Automated data acquisition has become a major part of the military's prognostics and diagnostics program as it moves towards a condition-based maintenance approach. The desire to apply this to a majority of new and legacy systems has led to the development of a prototype Prognostics and Diagnostics Health Monitoring System (PDHMS) with both serial and wireless communications capabilities that can be easily configured to different mechanical and electrical systems. This report addresses a complete system architecture of a prototype PDHMS. It verifies the data collection capabilities of the PDHMS by obtaining vibration signatures from bearings running on a machinery fault simulator, and by integrating the PDHMS for an embedded system-level demonstration in the Common Remotely Operated Weapons Station (CROWS). This report addresses the challenges in designing the hardware and developing the firmware for the PDHMS, discusses system limitations, and suggests areas for future improvement as seen by the developers.