Micro-Electronics Division - Fatigue Odometer Sensor

To guard against fatigue-based failures in weapon barrels, advanced sensors and systems are needed to monitor and record fatigue events the component experiences.  Such a historical record of each individual barrel will lead to more accurate tracking of remaining life and provide a reliable rubric with which to identify weakened barrels while preventing unnecessary disposal of quality barrels.

Building upon recent advances in low-power consumption sensor technologies, AST, in cooperation with the Army Benet Weapons Laboratories and South Dakota State University METLAB, has developed and demonstrated a robust fatigue-based round counting system with round differentiation ability.

Purpose

• Replace ‘weapons data card’ by creating a permanent record of rounds fired, maintenance performed, and history stored directly on the weapon barrel.
• Reduce burden on war fighter by eliminating the task of manually recording details of firing events.
• Improve ‘end-of-life’ calculations by providing a reliable count of rounds fired, record of round types fired, and barrel temperature at time of firing (an important piece of the end-of-life equations which is not currently collected).

Method

Collect 2 signatures from each round fired in order to verify ballistic event and identify round type, permanently store data, and transmit data to military database via RFID upon demand.

Status

• Successfully tested on .50-cal single shot rifle.
• Shown to accurately count all rounds and cannot be falsified.
• Identified all round types correctly.
• Must be field tested on large caliber system in order to adapt scaling and filtering value to larger signals.
• Currently powered by a small battery, Energy Scavenging Solution must be finalized.

The development of the FOS is nearing completion and will make an excellent addition to any large caliber weapon system.