Small Business/SBIR

Shuttle Vibration Detection System Commercialized

A WASHINGTON STATE COMPANY IS commercializing a vibration-tracking technology used for monitoring Space Shuttle payloads from delivery until liftoff. The G-Logger™ Acceleration Acquisition System, developed by Silicon Designs, Inc., of Issaquah, Washington, under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with Kennedy Space Center, is a portable, tri-axial data acquisition system for acquiring, storing and analyzing shock, vibration and temperature data. Its wide range of applications includes measuring transportation shock and vibration, unattended testing of machinery and equipment, and rotating machinery.

Kennedy Space Center's data acquisition system detects vibration and movement during Shuttle transports from assembly to the launch pad or test facilities. This battery- powered acceleration and thermal data acquisition system is well suited for a wide range of applications, including a shipping data recorder and the measuring of motor vehicles, aircraft and missiles, among others.

According to Silicon Designs' President John Cole, his company believes that industrial applications will include automotive applications, in which the acquisition system can be used for suspension testing, as a crash event detector or for racecar instrumentation. For aircraft applications, the G-Logger can serve as a flight vibration monitor. It can be used as a shipping and handling monitor for commercial shippers, in which it records tri-axial acceleration, vibration and shock conditions experienced by payloads.

NASA named this innovation the Smart Tri-Axial Acceleration Data Acquisition and Storage System. The objective was to build a tri-axial acceleration data acquisition system for payload monitoring that can continually measure and record three orthogonal acceleration components for a period of up to 4.6 days.

Because its response capability includes data communications, it can also measure payload orientation. Kennedy Space Center's Payloads Operations group is using the technology. Critical Space Shuttle payloads are sensitive to movement, and tracking payload ibration and movement is important in detecting damage caused by movement. Numerous payloads have to be transported from assembly and test facilities to the Shuttle launch pads and other assembly buildings. The device is self-contained and sealed from the weather, and it can operate unattended for up to three weeks on two D-cell batteries.

The system is easily programmed through a serial link to a personal computer or notebook computer running Windows 95/98. When activated, the G-Logger stores up to 8 megabytes of acceleration and temperature data in nonvolatile memory. Preprocessing the data into the parameter of interest before being stored makes efficient use of the memory. The unit can store sampled, peak or root mean squared (RMS) acceleration or velocity at a rate of 1 to 4,000 samples per second. After data collection, the data are subsequently downloaded to a personal computer for display and analysis.

For more information, contact Lewis Parrish at Kennedy Space Center. Call: 407/867-6373,
E-mail: ParriLM@kscgws00.ksc.nasa.gov Or visit www.silicondesigns.com
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