<title>ICAS: the center of diagnostics and prognostics for the United States Navy</title>

Abstract

In its past history, the United States Navy, has operated and performed maintenance utilizing either reactive or preventive maintenance philosophies. Recently, with the continual shrinking of resources, both monetary and personnel, the Navy has looked at various ways of reducing the workload and cumbersome work practices that its personnel have to perform. However, this is to be accomplished while maintaining its high level of readiness. [In fact, the CNO (ADM Vern Clark) has indicated the top five priorities for the Navy are manpower, current readiness, future readiness, quality of service, and Navy-wide alignment] 1 Due to these two requirements, the Navy has mandated a shift from its present maintenance philosophy, i.e. the Planned Maintenance System (PMS), to one that utilizes Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles. Simply put, the Navy wants to shift from a calendar based maintenance system, i.e. performing maintenance every so many days / months, to a maintenance system that is based upon the condition, performance and operation, of the equipment in question. To meet this objective, the Navy needed to apply condition-monitoring strategies for its ships' engineering equipment. The Navy chose to apply the Integrated Condition Assessment System (ICAS) to fill this requirement. ICAS has multiple applications that can be and are used by the Navy to help reduce workloads. However one of the key requirements that ICAS fills to enable CBM is the ability to trend machinery performance and diagnose machinery health. These two areas are key to the enabling of CBM within the Navy. With these tools, ICAS has the ability to turn the operational data that the new Machinery Control Systems (MCS) and the new sensor information systems provide into useful and useable information. This information can be used for the diagnosis of failures and the indications of possible future fault conditions.