Remaining Life Prognostics for an Army Ground Vehicle System

Reliability is a key parameter for the development of safe and effective military vehicles with a reasonable life cycle cost. One innovative technology that is being promoted in the Department of Defense is the use of Health and Usage Monitoring Systems and remaining life prognostics to improve reliability and availability. The feasibility of using data collected from a limited set of existing and simple add-on sensors to make fatigue damage estimations on a complexly loaded component within a military wheeled vehicle system was investigated. Methods for identifying the critical inputs for fatigue estimation are evaluated and compared. A baseline physics of failure analysis was performed on an example component to evaluate the proposed HUMS algorithms and demonstrate the accuracy of resulting fatigue predictions. *