Sensor-integrating gears: wear detection by in-situ MEMS acceleration sensors [Sensorintegrierende Zahnräder: Verschleißdetektion durch In-situ MEMS Beschleunigungssensoren]

Gear tooth wear is a common phenomenon leading to malfunctions in machines. To detect wear and faults, gear condition monitoring by vibration is established. The problem is that the measurement data quality for detection of wear by vibration is not good enough with currently established measurement methods, caused by long signal paths of the commonly used housing mounted sensors. In-situ sensors directly at the gear achieve better data quality, but are not yet proved in wear detection. Further it is unknown what analysis methods are suited for in-situ sensor data. Existing gear condition metrics are mainly focused on localized gear tooth faults, and do not estimate wear related values. This contribution aims to improve wear detection by investigating in-situ sensors and advance gear condition metrics. Using a gear test rig to conduct an end of life test, the wear detection ability of an in-situ sensor system and reference sensors on the bearing block are compared through standard gear condition metrics. Furthermore, a machine-learned regression model is developed that maps multiple features related to gear dynamics to the gear mass loss. ... mehrThe standard gear metrics used on the in-situ sensor data are able to detect wear, but not significantly better compared to the other sensors. The regression model is able to estimate the actual wear with a high accuracy. Providing a wear related output improves the wear detection by better interpretability.