Suspension
Impact has specific experience with diagnostics/prognostics for military ground vehicle suspension and height management systems. One of our projects was focused on developing an advanced diagnostic system to improve maintainability of the suspension system on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV).
The EFV has 14 independent Hydraulic Suspension Units (HSU’s) with two nitrogen gas charges each which may or may not have different nominal charge per station. The HSU’s can be retracted when the vehicle prepares for marine operations. Unfortunately, the current periodic suspension system maintenance procedure is a very error prone and time consuming process requiring jacking up the vehicle and performing manual station-by-station charge/re-charging. Furthermore, it is currently not possible to diagnose one or more HSU that may have lost charge (or have been charged improperly) and are affecting ride height/ride quality when the vehicle is sprung.
In response to this need, Impact Technologies, with the support of Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed an EFV suspension system diagnostic package for the EFV that resides on a maintenance support laptop. When provided with prior charge pressures, vehicle configuration and ride height, the software performs a multi-step optimization in conjunction with vehicle and HSU-level physical models, to automatically derive gas spring curves, predict proper in-situ charge levels for different mission configurations and/or help isolate improperly charged HSU’s.
This program is one example of Impact’s ability to develop custom software solutions for asset health management applications and leverage a broad experience base in physics-of-failure modeling, optimization, and diagnostics/prognostics best practices to quickly and cost effectively generate results and demonstrate value.
