Outline of Work
Objective
Approach
Results
Future Work

Objective- The objective of SHARP technology is to provide the operator and management with the current status of any equipment in real-time, i.e., assessment based upon current measurements. This is a valuable tool due to the fact that it will be able to predict when the failure of equipment will occur, and allow the user to take this particular piece of equipment out of service before failure. This would enable the user to obtain maximum use of the equipment without concerns of doing periodically scheduled maintenance when it is unnecessary, or unscheduled maintenance after the equipment has failed and is causing costly down time.

Approach- To reach these goals we are currently using a hydraulic test circuit and an expert system shell to interpret the sensor based measurements obtained from the hydraulic circuit. The sensor information is transmitted from the remote hydraulic system via the ethernet, to the user workstation. At the workstation, we are using G2, which is a rule based expert system shell from Genysm, to interpret the data. The expert system is used as the user interface to handle the embedded rules for real-time decision making and alarm handling for the user.

Schematic

Real-Time Expert System
Graphical User Interface
Object Oriented Modeling
Alarm Notification

Results- Currently we are able to monitor a remote hydraulic circuit via the ethernet to determine the health of the system in real-time. A user interface is provided to alert the operator in real-time when the system is failing. It also provides such information as to which component is failing and documentation on that particular component. We are also able to archive the data for future reference.

Charts

Real-Time Data Acquisition
Real-TIme Data Display

Future Work- We are in the process of enhancing our system health assessment configuration by integrating operator control into the system, which incorporates greater flexibility into the hydraulic circuit. We will be exploring the use of accelerometers to characterize the wear patterns of the hydraulic components, and investigating visual techniques for hydraulic leak detection and hose monitoring procedures. Develop health assessment and life prediction algorithms, based upon trend information.

Embedded Rules
Trending
Data Interpretation
Data Archiving
Alarm Handling