Health Monitoring for Condition-Based Maintenance of a HMMWV using an Instrumented Diagnostic Cleat

Operation & support costs for military weapon systems accounted for approximately 3/5^th of the $500B Department of Defense budget in 2006. In an effort to ensure readiness and decrease these costs for ground vehicle fleets, health monitoring technologies are being developed for Condition-Based Maintenance of individual vehicles within a fleet. Dynamics-based health monitoring is used in this work because vibrations are a passive source of response data, which are global functions of the mechanical loading and properties of the vehicle. A common way of detecting faults in mechanical equipment, such as the suspension and chassis of a ground vehicle, is to compare measured operational vibrations to a reference (or healthy) signature to detect anomalies. The main difficulty with this approach is that many vehicles are not equipped with sensors or the acquisition systems to acquire, process, and store data; therefore, to implement health monitoring, one must overcome the economic and technical barriers associated with equipping ground vehicles to continuously monitor the response. The research in this paper explores one approach that aims to overcome this difficulty. If a vehicle cannot be equipped with sensors, then an instrumented diagnostic cleat is proposed to measure the dynamic response of the vehicle as it traverses the cleat at a fixed speed. This approach could be effective because it eliminates the need for on-vehicle sensors, but provides measurements that indicate the condition of wheels/suspensions. A simple model of a HMMWV is used to simulate the approach. Experiments are also conducted using an instrumented cleat to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.