The Instrumented Shock Mount:
A Hutchinson Success Story

Hutchinson has been supporting the U.S. Navy with Navy mounts for over 50 years. Our isolator mounts provide excellent vibration and shock isolation from typical shipboard shock applications and function as marine engine mounts, marine transmission mounts, pump mounts and machinery mounts. Organizations across industries benefit from Hutchinson’s standard mounts and, like the Navy, count on us to supply them.

Identifying the Problem

To this point, we’ve been able to receive only limited, mostly anecdotal data from our customers regarding mount performance in specific conditions. When a customer comes to us, they provide information on the expected temperature and vibration challenges a mount will likely need to meet. But with limited capabilities available for testing in the field, we struggled to get the full story about what our products were ultimately up against. To overcome this limitation, we began to imagine a fully instrumented mount able to provide robust, real-time data over extended periods of time.

Designing a Solution

This new instrumented isolator mount needed to be identical to a standard, qualified mount, so it could be dropped immediately into any application. Its electronics needed to collect temperature and acceleration data from all sides for up to five years. Long after the end of the useful life of its electronics, the mount had to continue to perform all its primary functions.

The team at Hutchinson, working with our Sensor Center of Excellence , jumped right into the challenge. We designed an AA-battery-powered system using low-power electronics and software that enabled it to “wake up” upon detection of strong excitation, “sleep” when no excitation was detected, and go into “deep sleep” after prolonged periods without excitation to extend battery life. We designed software to provide data reporting on demand and at the end of its mission, easily integrating with more powerful tools to provide detailed analysis and investigation via a wired connection. The unit fits into a standard mount without sacrificing structural integrity, overall strength or endurance.

The Results

The Hutchinson team was able to put the project together from concept to functional prototype in just 10 months—an incredible feat considering the amount of engineering and programming that went into the project.

The Hutchinson Instrumented Mount is now available to anyone looking to monitor and evaluate environmental conditions and their impact on mount and isolated equipment performance. Whether it’s used to monitor first-time use of new equipment, identify and evaluate premature failures or creep, or provide data during manufacturers’ product testing, the instrumented mount is ready to be installed in place of the standard Naval, Marine, and Industrial equipment mounts. It conforms to IP67 requirements, will remain fully functional when submerged in up to one meter of water and is resistant to dust and airborne debris.

Hutchinson is ready and able to provide instrumented mount solutions to customers in Naval, Marine and Industrial equipment markets, in which equipment manufactures need in-application data to further improve their product’s performance. Contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss the ways the new Hutchinson Instrumented Mount can be put to work for your organization.

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