Hybrid residual fatigue life prediction approach for gear based on Paris law and particle filter with prior crack growth information

Abstract

Gear has been widely used in the modern industry, and the gear reliability is important to the driving system, which makes the residual fatigue life prediction for a gear crucial. In order to realize the residual fatigue life of the gear accurately, a hybrid approach based on the Paris law and particle filter is proposed in this paper. The Paris law is usually applied to predict the residual fatigue life, and accurate model parameters allow a more realistic prediction. Therefore, a particle filtering model is utilized to assess both model parameters and gear crack size simultaneously. As a data-driven method, particle filter describes the dynamical behavior of model parameters updating and gear crack growth, whereas the Paris law, as a model-based method, characterizes the gear's crack growth according to the physical properties. The integration of the Paris law and particle filter is proposed as a hybrid approach, which is suitable for nonlinear and non-Gaussian systems, and can update the parameters online and make full use of the prior information. Finally, case studies performed on gear tests indicate that the proposed approach is effective in tracking the degradation of gear and accurately predicts the residual gear fatigue life.

A comparative study of particle filters for prognostics implementation in industry

“…Consider a mechanical component subjected to fatigue. The crack size is chosen as the unique indicator representing the component's health state (YANG, YUAN, QIU, ZHANG, & LING, 2012;Liu, Jia, He, & Sun, 2017). Its transition function can be developed based on the Paris model (Paris & Erdogan, 1963) as following…”

Residual life prediction of bearings based on RBF approximation models

“…Its working environment is often complex and diverse and will be subject to long-term variable working conditions brought about by the load impact. Coupled with the actual use of the process, it is inevitable to meet the bearing lubrication is poor, sand and metal shavings and other contamination, overloaded operation and other reasons, so that the bearings have become one of the most prone to failure of the components [5][6][7]. As a matter of fact, sudden damage to bearings may stop the whole mechanical equipment from working, which not only brings about economic losses but even causes more serious safety accidents.…”