Retrofittable Machine Condition and Structural Excitation Monitoring From the Terminal Box

Retrofittable self-powered sensors for machine condition monitoring ease the burden of installation and decision-making for maintenance and acoustic performance assessment. Terminal box magnetic power harvesting sensors are nonintrusive. They require no special wiring and can simultaneously observe and correlate important variables for machine diagnostics, including vibration and speed. These correlated data can be used to detect and differentiate imbalances from failing structural mounts, among other possibilities. New hardware and algorithms are presented for enabling in situ vibration monitoring, with demonstrations on data sets from US Coast Guard vessels. A specific algorithmic focus of this paper is estimation of a machine's contribution to structure-borne noise and vibration, an important consideration for ship acoustic signature.