Publications
Automated sorting of mixed mode environment's data
Transportation of sensitive flight hardware requires information about the expected transportation environment as well as the actual transportation environment during the part's movement--typically vibration with superimposed intermittent shocks. Each data type has different sampling, processing, and specification requirements. Analyzing shock data requires high sampling rates and leads to large file sizes. A barrier to analyzing data has been the vast quantity of information acquired. Previous approaches have focused either on manually separating data or on selectively recording extreme data. The use of an automated approach allows for quickly verifying vibration and shock levels while retaining the robustness of the underlying data set. Further, the automated approach allows the environments engineer to select criteria for shock/vibration sorting, which removes the subjectivity associated with visual differentiation. This automated technique evaluated several vehicles over four different road conditions in the same time that one data set could have been processed using visual discrimination. Automated processing of satellite shipment vibration and shock data is made thoroughly and objectively vs. traditional shock and tilt indicators. The automated technique could also be useful in processing large amounts of on-orbit data for changes in vibration signature.