Combating Global Corrosion with Dual-Use Sensor Technology for Maintenance Readiness

CBM+

Problem Statement: Corrosion remains one of the Department of War’s most costly maintenance challenges, consuming approximately $20 billion annually and driving significant unscheduled downtime, inspection labor, and readiness loss across ships, aircraft, and stored equipment. Maintenance organizations still lack an affordable, scalable way to monitor atmospheric corrosivity directly, relying instead on manual inspections or single-point corrosion coupons. Current methods are slow, labor-intensive, and produce sparse data that can’t support predictive maintenance.

Description of the Innovation Solution: AmbientSense is developing an atmospheric corrosivity sensor and AI-driven software that make proactive corrosion prevention economically viable. The technology combines sacrificial conductive sensing elements with RFID-based interrogation to quantitatively measure environmental corrosivity without wiring or fixed infrastructure. At 20-100x lower cost than traditional monitoring solutions, sensors can be deployed at the scale needed to generate the environmental datasets required for machine learning driven corrosion forecasting, supporting CBM+. Unlike manual inspection or coupons, AmbientSense’s sensors provide continuous, quantitative, per-location data that scales economically across an entire fleet or facility, replacing sparse point-in-time snapshots with the kind of large-scale environmental dataset that has driven predictive maintenance breakthroughs in other industries.

Benefits to the DoW: Early modeling based on lab and field data indicates the potential to extend asset service life 2-5 years, improve maintenance efficiency by up to 30%, and reduce unexpected failures by up to 40%, while cutting inspection labor and unscheduled downtime. The sensor architecture is inherently cross-service: the same platform applies to enclosed shipboard compartments and avionics bays (early-warning corrosion alarms), prepositioned and containerized equipment in storage (mitigation ROI analysis), and base- or fleet-wide facilities (high-granularity corrosivity mapping); applicable across the Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and DLA storage and depot operations.

Innovation Challenges: Key challenges include transitioning the sensing architecture into manufacturable products operating over UHF RFID while maintaining low-cost deployment, and generating the large-scale field datasets needed to refine corrosivity models and predictive-maintenance applications.

Technical Maturity/Demonstration Results: The technology is TRL 4 and originated from a licensed Navy patent from NIWC Pacific. Accelerated corrosion testing validated predictable degradation relationships, resulting in a jointly filed provisional patent application with NIWC Pacific under a CRADA. AmbientSense has been deployed through the WATCHD Initiative, including on the USV Ranger (DOLUS Program) and at ANTX Coastal Trident, with multiple DoW stakeholder evaluations underway.