James Dante, Luna Innovations Incorporated; Fritz J. Friedersdorf, Luna Innovations
Corrosion severely impacts the life cycle cost, operational life, and readiness of Army ground vehicles. The Army spends an estimated $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year addressing corrosion-related issues with Army ground vehicles. Low cost and easy-to-use corrosivity sensors are desired to help the Army manage corrosion and reduce vehicle life cycle costs and improve system readiness. Knowledge of cumulative environmental severity, corrosion damage, and the state of protective coatings for individual vehicles would enable more effective prediction of asset life and reduce waste generation from vehicle maintenance. As an added benefit, a corrosion monitoring system could provide field performance data for determining the effectiveness and return on investment of corrosion prevention and control programs (new coating systems, wash cycles, etc). Successful implementation of a corrosion monitoring system would require that the sensors be low cost, small size and weight, and widely deployable. Additional requirements include EMI resistance, easy installation, simple operation and data analysis, and low maintenance. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Radio Frequency identification Device (RFID) tags to detect cumulative corrosion damage. Several critical design parameters are addressed.
