Development and Applications of Full-Scale Ship Hull Health Monitoring Systems for the Royal Norwegian Navy

See also ADM202216. Presented at the RTO Applied Vehicle Technology Panel (AVT) Specialists' Meeting on Recent Developments in Non-Intrusive Measurement Technology for Military Application on Model- and Full-Scale Vehicles, held in Budapest, Hungary on 25-28 Apr 2005. Published in RTO-MP-AVT-124, Paper 22. The original document contains color images.

FFI has through a number of projects been engaged in the development of ship hull structural health monitoring (SHHM) systems for the Norwegian Navy. Important goals are to increase safety, reduce damage and improve the operational utilization of the ship within the design limits, and reduce cost by condition based maintenance. The development of a practical SHHM system is based on the utilization of modern fiber optic sensor technology, detailed Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the ship hull, and a modular, scaleable signal processing and data storage computer system. The system gives real-time information on both the global wave load on the hull and the local load in a number of selected critical areas. An Extended SHHM (ESHHM) includes monitoring and recording of the ship motion and operating parameters in order to get a complete picture of the parameters influencing the hull load. Detailed characterization of the sea state is obtained by means of a wave radar and a microwave altimeter mounted in the bow which measure the meeting wave profile. An extended system has been installed on the Royal Norwegian Navy (RNoN) Mine Counter Measure Vessel (MCMV) "HNoMS Otra," and data is recorded and transmitted in batches to FFI for post processing during the test period. The paper presents a thorough introduction to the SHHM system and its applications, in addition to results and analyses of the data recorded onboard RNoN MCMV "HNoMS Otra".