An analytic approach to monitor main bearing health

Towards an innovative lubricant condition monitoring strategy for maintenance of ageing multi-unit systems.

“…We incorporate inspection-driven clustering dependence, where studies (e.g., [27][37]) consider opportunistic and preventive replacement only as alternative interventions. Moreover, our research considers other non-replacement stochastic maintenance actions such as centrifuging and filtration under CM, which offer a more realistic approach, hence extends the previous works (e.g., [23,27]) that solely employ replacement actions. In addition to quantifying the impact of lubricant (as a replaceable and consumable part) to the system, the study equally considers the influence of lubricant degradation as a measure of equipment ageing effects, an aspect also unique in the literature.…”

“…As a non-repairable spare, various corrective (CM) and preventive(PM) maintenance replacement interventions are proposed in literature and practice to mitigate the ageing degradation of the lubricant, addressing the shortfall in performance to return its properties to an acceptable operational state. The in-service lubricant can undergo full drainage, also known as Full-Volume Oil Changes (FVOC), where all the oil in the sump is replaced [27]. A partial oil change or Short-Volume Oil Change (SVOC) depicts draining and refilling the oil with some fraction of the total sump volume [27] [28].…”

“…The in-service lubricant can undergo full drainage, also known as Full-Volume Oil Changes (FVOC), where all the oil in the sump is replaced [27]. A partial oil change or Short-Volume Oil Change (SVOC) depicts draining and refilling the oil with some fraction of the total sump volume [27] [28]. Lastly, replacing the lubricant with system purging at predetermined intervals depicts the PM strategy [29].…”

“…In the first place, previous studies (e.g., [12,27,29,30]) disregard non-replacement interventions like centrifuging and filtering, thereby overlook stochastic dependence between the lubricant and equipment under imperfect maintenance. Research following this approach has been mostly restricted to repairable multi-components (e.g., [31][32] ).…”

A Method for Monitoring Lubrication Conditions of Journal Bearings in a Diesel Engine Based on Contact Potential

“…However, the vibration method is difficult to apply due to the many excitation sources, complex transmission paths, signal interferences, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Some researchers used the oil analysis method to monitor the conditions of bearings, such as Bai, who used ferrography and spectrometric analysis technology to monitor the conditions of bearings [13], and Shah, who described a method to monitor main bearing health using periodically collected lube oil samples [14]. Because the collected lubrication oil flows through various friction pairs within a diesel engine, it is difficult to determine which friction pair is faulty.…”