Wireless hull monitoring systems for modal analysis of operational naval vessels
There is increasing interest by the naval engineering community in permanent monitoring systems that can monitor the structural behavior of ships during their operation at sea. Hull monitoring systems offer opportunities to better understand the performance of hulls during extreme sea states. Additional functionality envisioned for future systems includes automated health monitoring of the ship. In this study, a hull monitoring system assembled from wireless sensors is proposed for high-performance ships. Wireless sensors provide a low-cost platform for the collection of structural response data. In a military setting, wireless sensor networks can provide advantages over their cable-based counterparts in the form of adaptability, redundancy, and weight savings. In this study, a 28-channel wireless sensor network is deployed on a high-speed littoral combat vessel. The FSF-1 SeaFighter provides an ideal platform for a proof-of-concept study since the ship has been previously instrumented with a dense network of cabled sensors. The wireless sensors are used to compile acceleration and strain data and to compute modal properties of the vessel. © 2009 Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.
