Etegent Technologies, LTD has been awarded a $750,000 Phase II SBIR contract from the US Air Force to create waveguide based vibration sensors and fuse these better waveguide vibration sensors with the output of existing oil debris montoring systems for improved turbine engine health management.
When bearings begin to fail in machinery, they emit specific vibration characteristics which enable detection before complete failure. In gas turbine engines, however, the bearings are deep inside the engine and due to the harsh enviroment and the lack of accessibility for maintenance, traditional vibration sensors cannot be placed inside near the bearings but must be located on the exterior of the engine. Due to the comparatively long distance from the bearings to the sensor and the large amount of noise and vibration produced by turbine engines, bearing defect frequencies are too difficult to reliably detect with current sensors. The waveguide vibration sensor is a device which mechanically transmits the bearing vibration along a thin metal wire from inside the engine near the bearing to the outside of the engine where traditional piezoelectric materials can measure it in a benign, accessible location. In the Phase I testing, the waveguide vibration sensor was shown to provide 3x better bearing defect detectablitliy in a Rolls-Royce 501KB5+ industrial gas turbine engine.