Innovative Submersible Outboard Cable Failure Detection and Prediction Device

Ridgetop Group will develop a non-destructive, ruggedized toolset consisting of a personal hand-held device that uses an innovative, compact Power Draw Correlation Technique to detect damage to multi-conductor Submersible High Data Rate (SubHDR) cables. The toolset also consists of an innovative adaptive time-to-failure (ATTF) prognostic algorithm to generate accurate remaining useful life (RUL) estimates for detected damaged cables, such as those in the sensor masts of Virginia class submarines. A hand-held device transmits pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) along the cable: in the presence of cable damage, the PRBS energy reflects along the cable and the scattered energy will not be random. Using auto-correlation (correlogram), non-random energy causes peaks in the correlation integral; a signal phase shift indicates the damage location. As the cable damage increases, the strength of the correlogram signal increases, and this signal characteristic is a fault-to-failure progression (FFP) signature that is input to the ATTF prognostic algorithm. Ridgetop will also investigate whether time-domain reflectometry (TDR) can determine damage locations.