NASA is partnering with industry to develop a new health monitoring system to increase safety and efficiency in complex industrial plants, such as power generation and water treatment facilities.
The new industrial plant health monitoring system will be based on the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS), a technology developed at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley. The IMS technology uses artificial intelligence and data-mining techniques to build system-monitoring knowledge bases from archived or simulated sensor data to detect unusual or anomalous behavior that may indicate an impending system failure. The IMS currently is helping analyze data from systems that help fly and maintain the space shuttle and the International Space Station. Previously, the IMS has been used by NASA’s hybrid combustion facility, an advanced rocket fuel test facility, the RASCAL UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, and to monitor engine systems on an F/A-18 Hornet aircraft. “We recently granted a non-exclusive patent license to a local company to develop new software based on the IMS technology developed at NASA Ames,” said Phil Herlth, technology partnership manager at NASA Ames. “This agreement represents a continuation of NASA’s commitment to transfer technology to the commercial marketplace,” he added.
“We have integrated the NASA technology into our Remote Manager software platform to provide complete early warning and diagnostics software for the process industries,” said Peter Millett, CEO of iSagacity, Inc., of Half Moon Bay, Calif. According to Millett, the NASA technology will greatly enhance the capabilities of its Web-based monitoring products, such as Remote Manager.
“The combination of the NASA technology with our algorithms already in place in Remote Manager provides an unprecedented capability to identify potential problems in almost any type of process before the equipment fails,” Millett said. “The problem in many industries has not been a lack of sensor data, but the ability to make sense of it all in a time frame that can support operations.”
iSagacity is an engineering and software company that provides a suite of software applications to monitor and analyze operating data from critical equipment and systems in the process industries. For more information about iSagacity, Inc., please visit:
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